Advantages of APA Writing Style
- APA style was developed by the American Psychological Association.paper image by max blain from Fotolia.com
Academic writing entails a certain style. You can use one of several different styles to format your paper. The most popular are MLA, Harvard, and APA. APA style, called after the American Psychological Association, which developed this standard, has certain advantages over the other styles, though the other formats are also good. - APA style is probably the most widely-used formatting standard in English language. Most journals have adopted it and many colleges and universities also format their papers according to APA. If your paper complies with APA guidelines, it could be accepted to a university publication or a journal with minimal reformatting.
- APA style makes images, figures, graphs and tables easy to fit into the document. This allows the writer to better visualize the presented material, arranging numerical data in an easily comprehensible form. Visualization of information is especially necessary in scientific publications with a lot of dates.
- It is easy to find documentation on the APA style. The American Psychological Association routinely publishes new editions of the APA style online, allowing any interested party to access them free of charge. In addition, numerous other websites provide APA-style formatting samples and give guidelines on how best to format a document so it will comply with the APA style.
- APA style does not permit footnotes or endnotes, but allows in-text citations to the references pages that come at the end of the paper. Footnotes and endnotes distract the reader from his reading, and so their absence makes the paper look more coherent and better-written.
- APA style in most cases requires the document to be double-spaced. This format makes the paper more easy to read, and provides the reader ample space to make any marks or editorial comments in the text.