Your question: APA style?

mecah asked:

OK...My question is how do I write references from 5 web sites in APA Style? I have to do a paper on a criminal topic and i had to pick references off of 5 different web sites, and write a references sheet in APA Style..Can you help me understand?

I answered:

Hi, mecah!

There are several ways to cite references in papers, and APA is one of those styles.

If you've been asked to do your bibliography APA style by your teacher, then head on over to these sites:

APA style on Wikipedia: Go to "Electronic Sources" and follow the instructions based on the kind of online site your reference is. The wiki's got a sample that you can use as a basis.

Long Island University's APA Citation Style: The samples here are simpler but the wiki has more of the explanations if you need to understand what it all means.

Hope this helped!

Writing essays

When I had to write essays in class under time pressure, I usually went step-by-step like this:

1. Decide on my position regarding the question BEFORE I START WRITING. (And yet I forgot to do this sometimes, believe it or not.)
2. Declare my position if not in the first sentence, in the first two sentences.
3. Use the rest of the space to explain.
4. Use the last two lines (or last line) to re-state my position.

Some essays will require more research and organization, and here are some tips from other sources.

This is from Kathy Livingston's site and these apply more for essays that you get as homework assignments:

1. Decide on your topic.
2. Prepare an outline or diagram of your ideas.
3. Write your thesis statement.
4. Write the body.
Write the main points.
Write the subpoints.
Elaborate on the subpoints.
5. Write the introduction.
6. Write the conclusion.
7. Add the finishing touches.

Something on effective essay-question answering from the Purdue University Online Writing Lab:

1. Read through all the questions carefully.
2. Budget your time and decide which question(s) you will answer first.
3. Underline the key word(s) which tell you what to do for each question.
4. Choose an organizational pattern appropriate for each key word and plan your answers on scratch paper or in the margins.
5. Write your answers as quickly and as legibly as you can; do not take the time to recopy.
(Go to the page for the complete list of tips.)

scholar.google.com

Google Scholar is a search engine for academic papers and documents, or "scholarly literature", as they put it. You can find many references for your "review of related literature" here, although many sites provide only abstracts and not the full text of documents. If you hit a dead end with an article that you can't read for free, search for related work of the authors -- maybe you'll find other sites that have more information.

This is also very helpful when your topic is something that is too current ("blogging habits of high school students", "social networks" etc) for your school library to have gotten good resources on it already.

ottobib.com

Tip for that term paper: OttoBib is a website that automatically generates entries for your bibliography in the different format standards. (APA, MLA, Turabian, etc... depending on what you need.)

You'll need the ISBN of the book you're referencing, so you should take note of it in case you found the book in a library. But even if you didn't note it down, you can find a book's ISBN online anyway. (Hint: Google can help.)