Most Common Formatting Mistakes Committed by Students

Common Formatting Mistakes
You have finished writing your paper. Now it is time to review your writing and edit your paper. You will analyze the grammar and punctuation. You will need to check if your spellings are accurate and there is coherence in the material. And you will need to make sure if the format is correct. The papers are required to be written in a format that your instructor has suggested. The APA formatting style is most commonly used these days. To ensure that your paper follows the desired formatting style you need to avoid the common formatting mistakes made by the students. These mistakes made by the students range from general to very particular. The article below by a dissertation writing service UK will highlight some most common mistakes that students carry out during their paper writing.

Incorrect Running Head:
Running head are the first words in a paper that appear on the title page. According to a study around 86% of the students either do not include a running head in their paper or the running head was incorrectly formatted. The running head is basically the shortened version of the title. It appears in the header of all pages. Make sure to include a running head and page numbers in the text file. If you are not sure about the proper way of format you can consult the manual for APA Style formatting. Put special focus on size, font and character length of the running head. Also check the alignment for running head and page numbers.

Abstract:
Most of the students neglect this most essential part of the paper. Abstract is either formatted wrongly or the paper doesn’t have an abstract in the first place. Make sure that you use a separate page for abstract and its’ heading is rightly formatted. The most common mistake that students do is that they format the heading in bold and/or italics. But the rule is quite opposite to it. The heading of abstract should be centered and formatted like the rest of text. As the abstract is an important part of your paper collect more information about it to make it more captivating and eye-catching. 


In-text Citations:
You have spent a lot of your precious time in researching and writing the paper. Now it is time to cite the sources that you have used in your writing. Many students fail to cite these sources correctly. Make sure that you know the rules that APA Style requires of citing the works written by various authors. In APA Style an in-text citation requires the author’s last name and the year of publication. If you are directly using the words of author, page number from the original work should be mentioned as well. Make sure that the names and year of publication of your citation are consonant throughout the text. Take care while using commas and ampersand when you are citing a work by multiple authors. The multiple citations that appear in a single parenthesis must be in alphabetical order.

Headings:
Most of the students got confused about the format of their headings. In APA Style formatting the headings are one of the demanding tasks. The best way to extract guidance is from the 6th Publication Manual (APA, 2009) which provides a detailed analysis of heading structure.

Reference List:
Reference list is the crucial part of your paper. Researches show that students do not format the references and some of them do not include the reference list at first place. You need to make a “References” heading under which you will mention the references. Now you need to look through your reference list and point out the mistakes like: incorrect use of commas, full stops, ampersands, italics. 


The best way to avoid complications while formatting the reference list is to use referencing software. These programs will lessen your burden. They will make the organization of references much easier for you. But if you want to format the reference list by yourself, make sure to know the different ways in which the references can be formatted for various sources such as books, journals and dissertations etc. Punctuation marks and formatting of title are also crucial part of the reference list.

Both the references and the general layout of reference list are important. While checking the mistakes in the references make sure that they are ordered correctly. It may seem difficult to remember so many rules but the work done with patience and experience will always get fruitful results. By grasping these rules you can make some high scoring assignments.

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