APA

The American Psychological Association (APA) style is, originally, a set of rules that authors use
when submitting papers for publications in the journals of the APA. Established in 1929, the style has
since been used to guide research writers and help them achieve – through the use of established
standards for language, the construction of correct reference citations, the avoidance of plagiarism, the
proper use of headers, among many others – "minimum distraction and maximum precision".

As a complete style and guideline for writing, the APA is a valuable tool for writing scientific papers,
laboratory reports, and papers covering topics in the field of psychology, education, and other social
sciences. The APA style allows for in-text citations, direct quotations, and endnotes and footnotes. It
is also enables the author to use the past tense of verbs in the reportage.

Standards of the APA style include:

 Bibliographic list of references

 Alphabetical order by author in the bibliographic list, then chronological by work
 Referenced authors organized in the bibliographic list by last name, first initial, then middle
initial
 Italicized titles of periodicals listed in the bibliography, with the words of the title capitalized
 Titles of books capitalized according to "sentence-style" capitalization
 In-text citations in parenthesis, with the author's last name, year of publication, and page number
included (Smith, 1988. p. 4)
 Double-spaced lines
 Page numbers – plus the shortened title of the work – placed in the upper right of every page
 Title centered an inch below the top of the page
 Double-spaced footnotes / endnotes, used sparingly for non-crucial information, and which are
subscripted with a number that relates to the footnote

MLA
The Modern Language Association (MLA) style is the leading style of documentation for literary
research, as well as academic papers in the humanities field. It follows a specific set of rules for
formatting manuscripts, and is considered, along with the APA style, a standardized reference format
in college. Compared to the APA style, however, the MLA style focuses on the citation of books,
anthologies, literary works, audio-visual material, multimedia, and similar works with much more
detail.

Also, unlike the APA style, the present tense of verbs is most commonly used in the MLA style. Other
MLA standards include:

 Bibliographic list of works cited

 Alphabetical order by author in the bibliographic list, then alphabetical by work
 Centered titles an inch below the tops of the page
 Referenced authors / names organized in the bibliographic list by last name, first name, then
middle initial
 In-text citations in parenthesis, with only the author's last name and page number included (Smith
4)
 Double-spaced lines, but with no extra line breaks between each citation
 Footnotes (superscripted) also used to provide non-essential information