APA Style Updates - October 2009

As we stated in earlier posts, the current 6th edition of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (APA Publication Manual) has a number of inconsistencies and oversights in it. We are trying to correct and update our guides as information becomes available from official APA sources—click here for past revisions. To this end, we have posted our latest revisions of the APA Style Guide, 6th ed. and the APA Sample Paper. You can download each by clicking the following links:

• APA Sample Paper [.docx version]
• APA Style Guide, 6th ed. [.docx version]

The To Quote, Paraphrase, or Block Quote? – APA Style guide remains unchanged.

---

CHANGES MADE:

RUNNING HEAD
Previously it was documented that the running head would start on page 1 (title page) and appear on every succeeding page in the following format:

Running head: THIS IS MY ABBREVIATED ESSAY TITLE

This was incorrectly documented in the APA Publication Manual it should appear:

Page 1: Running head: THIS IS MY ABBREVIATED ESSAY TITLE
Succeeding pages: THIS IS MY ABBREVIATED ESSAY TITLE


FIGURES & TABLES
• Notes are now correctly double-spaced—not single-spaced.
• Notes for these sections indicate that tables can be single to double spaced.
• Figure label and caption/title of figures are supposed to follow the figure on a page—not precede it. Examples in both documents have been updated to reflect this clarification.
• The table example on page 8 of the sample paper remains double spaced; this is to demonstrate the spatial relationship between a heading and its associated information.

BLOG CITATION (p.9 of APA Style Guide, 6th ed.)
An example of how to cite a blog was added to the APA Style Guide, 6th ed. handout. The example is the first one at the top of page 9.

ANATOMY OF A REFERENCE (p.4 of APA Style Guide, 6th ed.)
For the journal example, a noted was added to direct readers to page 6 of the guide for more information on citing the electronic versions of journal articles.

MARGINS
It is still unclear what the exact parameters for the margins are. APA says that text appears within a 1 in. margin at each side of the page. The lack of clarity regards whether or not the running head and page number are inside the 1 in. margin (which would effectively push essay text to the 1.5 in. mark from the top edges of the pages). Adding to the ambiguous nature of margin parameters are the APA’s sample papers—where margins vary throughout the presentation. We are still relying on the more clearly define margin and header boundaries from the 5th edition manual. This could, however, change once the detail is clarified by the APA.

---

If you have any comments, concerns, or questions regarding this latest round of amendments, please e-mail us at: reference@mhc.ab.ca.

The revised documents carry the October 2009 revision date.

For a complete list of all of our guides, click here.