APA Dissertation Format: Common Mistakes And Basic Rules

The basic rules of APA format are that all every APA paper including dissertations has a title page, abstract, body, and references.  These are just the basic format of every APA paper but there are other aspects to it.  You also have to have headers and a page number on each page and the header is a running heading.  Also each section of your paper has to be on a separate piece of paper.  And your entire paper has to be double spaced, Times New Roman 12pt, with one-inch margins.  Your references have to be in alphabetical order and need to be indented like a paragraph.  This is just the basic set up of an APA dissertation, now let’s talk about the common mistakes people make with APA format.

Common Mistakes

• Believe it or not a lot of people actually forget to put a running header and page numbers in their APA dissertation.  The running heading is a shorten version of your title of your paper, this and the page number are aligned right at the top of each page.
• The next mistake is that students don’t format the heading for their abstract right or they don’t include on in their APA dissertation.  This should be on a separate page and centered but not bold or italics.  This is a common mistake that students make by making the title bold or italics, it should look like the rest of the text.
• Keywords are a very important part of your APA dissertation.  These keywords help your dissertation become easier to find if it is searched for in a search engine.  You did a lot of hard work on your dissertation and I’m sure you want others to read it so make sure you include keywords.
• In text citations is another mistakes that students forget to put in their dissertation or they do it wrong.  In text citations are put in after a sentence that is used as a reference, you put a comma after the sentence and then parenthesis with the author’s last name and page number and a period after the parenthesis.
• And the last mistake that student do is there reference page.  They don’t put in on the last page separate page and they don’t do the references right.  There is an easy solution to this mistake, you can use a citation machine to do your references for you but you still have to keep track of all the information to put it in them. This will ensure that you don’t do them wrong or forget to do them.