APA style stumpers
Answers to five common questions—and one unusual one.
By Laurie Meyers
gradPSYCH staff
How do I cite a class discussion? A Web site? Reference the back of a cereal box?*
Those are just some of the typical, even strange, style inquiries that APA staff field every day. But over the years, several questions about APA style come up over and over again. The answers can be found in the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, but to save you time and trouble, here are the most frequently asked questions:
 What is APA style?
It may sound like a mysterious and secret language, but APA style is simply a set of rules for formatting references, statistics, tables and punctuation in psychology-related papers or articles. It addresses such details such as whether to use quotation marks or italics for book titles and the proper spacing after a period.
When I took a typing class, the instructor told us to put two spaces after a period. Why does the APA manual say to include only one?
APA and other modern style gurus say the double-space convention is a persistent habit left over from the pre-computer age when spacing was uneven and two spaces were needed to set sentences apart. Computers use proportional fonts, so nowadays only one space is required after all punctuation.
How do I cite Web material?
If you're referring to a whole Web site, you can include the address within your text in parentheses. For a Web page with no author, the text citation should include the first few words of the title and the year the page was written. For Web pages with no stated author or year, use a heading title and n.d. (no date) in place of the date. For referencing a specific part of the Web text, use paragraphs if there are no pages.
Blogs have their own set of rules, which can be found in the APA Style Guide to Electronic References. An example for a blog post would be: Vaughn. (2008, April 9). Repressing the bricks and mortar of madness. Posted to http://www.mindhacks.com/
What precedes page numbers: 'p.'," pp." or nothing at all?
When referencing—either within the body of text or in your reference list—any periodical or journal that uses a volume number, just include the range of page numbers. If your reference doesn't include a volume number, put "pp." in front of the range of page numbers you're referencing. Use "p." when referencing a single page.
How do I format a bibliography in APA style?
Good news: You don't have to. APA style doesn't require bibliographies for papers, but it does require reference lists. Bibliographies often include resources not cited in the text and may even include annotated descriptions. A reference list, on the other hand, includes just the material cited in your text. The list should be double-spaced and alphabetized according to the authors' last names.
For more information, visit APA's frequently asked questions. For help learning APA style, check out Mastering APA Style. And for assistance on formatting papers, download the APA Style Helper software.
*Extra credit: How do I cite the back of a cereal box?
"Technically the cereal box would not represent an easily retrievable source, so we'd discourage its use for that reason," says Timothy McAdoo, an APA journals style guru. "You could cobble together a reference using the company as a group author, but you'd risk looking a little silly."
If you insist upon using a cereal box, you should probably treat it like specialized equipment, says McAdoo. No citation in the reference list is required—just the company name, location and model number in parentheses within the text of the document, which in the case of a cereal box might include a batch number.
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