Job Skills: Professional Writing 

APA Style (American Psychological Association Style) is a set of guidelines used in academic writing. These guidelines are called "publication conventions". Sometimes you might see these conventions referred to as APA or APA formatting. You will need to use APA Style for your work in this course and for future work, as well as in other college courses.

In the Family and Human Services program you will be taught different aspects of APA style in different courses. As you learn a new feature of APA you will be expected to use it in all your work moving forward. You will be taught a new characteristic of APA style in each class. In FAML 160 you will learn the basic formatting expected in APA style. 

 Basic APA Formatting Rules

For all of your writing assignments in this program, you will be expected to format your papers with the following: 

• 12pt Times New Roman font

• Double-spaced: All pages in the paper. TIP: MS Word adds an additional blank line each time you start a new paragraph. You need to remove this in your Paragraph Settings. 

• 1-inch margins (top, bottom, left, and right)

• Left aligned, with the first line of every paragraph indented by 0.5 inches. 

Download and save the Basic APA Template. 05_document_APA_Basic_Template.docx (live.com)

You will find it helpful to use this as you write your papers throughout this course.