As a student, you must understand how to format your papers properly. Formatting helps organize your ideas and can make them more accessible for the reader to follow. You want to make sure that any formatting mistakes or errors do not distract from the meaning of what you are trying to say in your paper.
As you can imagine, students have a lot of assignments to complete and tests to prepare for. With all of this going on, writing can seem daunting. Because students need external help, do my assignment is an excellent option they can use.
If you want your writing to get high grades, you must learn how to format papers according to common academic standards. This means knowing when and how much white space should be used (and when not), as well as which style guide/template will help ensure that everything looks professional and presentable while still being readable by professors who have read thousands of other academic papers over their careers.
Table of Contents
What is paper formatting?
- Paper formatting refers to the layout of your work. How you format your paper can help the reader understand what you are trying to say and will impact how they judge its quality.
- When people read a paper, they look for certain things:
- Organisation—can the author present information in a logical manner? For example, does he or she use headings, subheadings, and paragraphs that clearly state what is being discussed?
- Clear writing style—is it easy to follow along with the author’s train of thought? Is there enough evidence to know whether these opinions are based on research or experience? And finally, is any bias shown towards one side of an issue over another (e.g., is this writer arguing against abortion)?
Here is the basic APA style guide.
The APA style guide is a common way to format papers and is used in many disciplines. Here are the basic rules of how to format different types of citations, including titles:
- Italics for longer works, like books and films. (The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn)
- Italics for shorter works that have no volume number, like journal articles. (“The Psychology of Terrorist Groups”)
- Quotation marks for shorter works with volume numbers, like chapters in a book or essays in an edited volume (“‘The Psychology of Terrorist Groups'”).
MLA formatting style.
MLA style is the most commonly used in the humanities and liberal arts. It is based on the author-date method of citation, which means that you’re not expected to use footnotes or endnotes but rather cite all sources you use in your paper in parentheses within your text. You should also provide a bibliography at the end of your paper with complete information about each source.
The MLA style uses parenthetical citations: For example, (Smith 23) or (Smith 23–25). This means that when referring to any work within your paper, whether a book or an article from a journal, you need to give both its title and the author’s last name (or editor’s last name). An example would be:
In addition to giving details about where you got ideas for research projects and writing assignments from other sources such as books or articles online through databases like JSTOR and EBSCOhost.
Chicago/Turabian formatting style.
The Chicago/Turabian (or Author-Date) style of writing academic papers is a style that is used in many universities. It is also known as the “author-date” style of writing because it requires you to cite your sources at the end of each section or whenever they are directly quoted.
Two professors created this method of formatting at the University of Chicago named, Fred B. Robinson and Edward G. Burke, who published their paper on this subject in 1906 under the title A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations: Chicago Style for Students and Researchers to Become More Familiar With This Formatting Scheme That Is Used So Widely Throughout Academic Institutions Today.
Harvard formatting style.
To use Harvard formatting style, italicize book and movie titles. Put the title of a poem or short story in quotation marks. Use quotation marks for longer works, such as books, movies, and television shows.
Here are some examples:
- “The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald
- “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost
Conclusion
The last thing you want is to write an entire paper and then realize that it’s full of mistakes. Formatting is an essential part of the writing process, and if you don’t grasp how to do it properly, you should take some time to learn with some literature review examples. Luckily for us all, there are plenty of resources out there that can help with this–including our article here!
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