A Complete Guide To Writing The 6th Edition APA Style Dissertation

The American Psychological Association style guide is an accepted format for writing dissertations and academic papers in various fields of the social sciences. The following are some of the most important factors to format your writing with if you are following this structure.

A guide on following the 6th edition APA Style:

• First, you will need to double space your entire paper. From the actual text of the references in the end - needs to be set in double spacing format.


• The main section where you will need to follow the APA style guide closely is in the citation section at the end of your paper.


• The citation page should be titled as ‘References’, and this should be placed at the center at the top of the page. Unless of course if you have only one citation, in which case the title of the page should simply be ‘Reference’.


• There should be a one-inch margin space maintained on all sides of the Reference page; this includes the top, bottom, left and right sides of the page or pages


• As far as alignment of each citation entry goes, the first line of the citation should be left aligned. Every other line that follows this entry should be tabbed five spaces from the left margin - this is also known as the hanging indent spacing style that can be set at half an inch.


• The page numbers of your entire document should be situated at the upper right corner of each of the pages


• The paragraphs in your entire document should be indented at half an inch each


• Your document should also ideally be separated into different sections that you might already have done. The APA style has instructions for five different levels of headings. Ideally, you should speak to your mentor or instructors as to what kind of headings you should be using for your dissertation.

These are the basic rules to follow so that you can prepare your dissertation according to the 6th edition APA style. However, there are even more detailed instructions available on this format. The section that you will need to pay close attention to, as discussed before is the References page. This is the section you should look up in more detail so that you can correctly cite the sources you have used in your paper. The rules for this section are mostly to do with how you will arrange the books, journals, and their authors in the correct fashion.