
In addition to following all of the universal APA rules, the body starts with the Title of the Paper, centered, at the top of the page. However, if you add an Abstract or Table of Contents, they would come between the Title Page and the Paper’s Body. The Paper body is the second major part of an APA Research Paper. Include any of the optional information your professor requests beneath these (class, date, professor name, etc.). This information should be center-aligned and appear in the top half of the page. The Title page must include three pieces of information (and any optional information your professor asks for). It’s also the page where you see the full Running Head as described above.


The Title page is the first page of your Paper and has the identifying information for the paper. The numbers should not be inserted manually and should not include any identifying information such as your name just the number Number the pages starting on the first page.Įach page of the paper should be numbered from the very first page (almost always a Title Page). On subsequent pages, “RUNNING HEAD:” is left off.Ĥ. However, on the first page, the Running Head should be preceded with: “RUNNING HEAD:”. On every page, the Running Head should be in all capital letters and no longer than 50 characters, including spaces.

This is confusing because APA requires the Running Head to be different on the first page from all of the following pages. There should be a Running Head on each page. Indentation is not used in figures, tables, and captions.ģ. Lines in the paper’s body should be double-spaced with a first-line indent of.

PERRLA uses Times New Roman throughout its papers because of this reason. A serif-ed font (one with the lines at the ends of the letters) are better for reading. Luckily, this is the default for Microsoft Word, so you shouldn’t have to worry about it too much.Īccording to the APA 6th Edition Manual Section 8.03, APA’s preferred standard font is Times New Roman at 12 points. In addition to these three parts, there are a few basic “over-arching” rules that are universal for the entire paper.Ī margin is the amount of space between the edge of the paper and where the text starts. There can be other optional parts as well: Abstract, Table of Contents, and Appendices. There are three major parts to any APA Research Paper: the Title Page, the Body, and the Reference Page.
