In academic writing, how you present your information technically is often seen as important as the ideas you are putting forth. Proper citing, quoting and referencing of source material allows you to convey your breadth of research in a language commonly shared by others in your discipline. Giving others a chance to review and compare your work under these established guidelines enables your instructors to better see the work on its own merits, opposed to getting sidetracked by technical inefficiencies.

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You must follow the rules like every other student: this is not an area where you want to stand out for doing things your own way. Writing for any academic purpose carries with it certain expectations and formatting consistencies, and a failure to properly understand how or why you cite your sources in a specific way can have negative effects on your written projects and communications. There are three main schools of style used to properly format an academic paper, referred to as apa, mla, or cms.

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These are the official guidelines put forth by the american psychological association, now in its sixth edition. This is the preference of the social sciences, so if you are studying sociology, psychology, medicine, or social work you are going to know apa style. The modern language association provides guidelines you will be familiar with if you are focused on the humanities: so artists, english majors, and theatre students will know mla as they have used this style now for more than half a century. These are the style guidelines put forth in the chicago manual of style. Cms style is predominantly seen in the humanities, particularly with literature students and those who study advanced segments of history and/or the arts.

While these formatting methods will share many characteristics such as margins and spacing, how they attribute references to source materials is the main differentiator. For example, apa lists references while mla calls the same thing works cited a small but important distinction that might actually affect your grade. Typically, you are going to use one style for most of your classes and communications, but there is certainly the possibility that you'll need to know how to use any one of these three common styles. The good news is it is not hard to get up to speed on any one of them and use them properly.

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Regardless of which style you are using, it is imperative to get the most recent version of the guidelines to ensure your paper is as accurate as it can be. Each of the sources have updated their guidelines multiple times over the years, so working with the current standards is goal one. Apa and mla are the most common styles to use, but cms is not unheard of just not as common for undergrads. Cms is commonly used in traditional book publishing and academic publishing situations, so if you are doing post graduate writing, it is good to know. The main thing that seems to be changing in the rules for all of them is about the proper attribution of web related sources, so you are going to want to re check that you are working from the most recent versions of whichever style guide you need.

The common mistakes being made in properly styling citations and references might be as simple as not downloading the most recent updates however, it may also be a case where students are simply not understanding how to infuse referencing properly. Who has studied social science and has taught health care administration and career development at a college level for various universities for more than five years, are errors in properly citing web references. Professor long and his students being in the social sciences have never used anything except apa style. He continues: while some common apa formatting errors may be issues due to changes in updated guidelines apa 5 vs. Apa 6 , there are other, perhaps more common instances where a student fails to properly reference the source materials within writing assignments. Understanding how to properly reference and cite source materials adds power to any student paper, because the papers can be used to show a proper understanding and blending of source ideas a critical concept in higher learning. Some of the changes to the guidelines seem very dubious and meticulous, he continues, but standards are there so an evaluator can assess the weight of the material without bias.

Many of my students might complain about it, but the ones that succeed are the ones who are actively trying to use citing resources to their own argument's advantage. Apa students are not the only ones who have common mistakes in formatting as evidenced by the following insight offered from dr. Where she and her students have used primarily mla guidelines in their writing, editing and literature classes.

Walters has taught a variety of undergraduate and graduate level writing courses at kennesaw state university for over 15 years. Walters said, the most common problems i see with mla style occur in the writing, meaning the text itself, not the bibliography or works cited. In the text, the most common problems are: putting a period before and sometimes after the parenthetical citation, as in: . Placing the closing quotation mark after the citation in parenthesis instead of after the quote: . Placing quotation marks inside commas and periods instead of after them: smith tells us that among the most important rules are the ones regarding use of commas , yet he does not explain how this happens.