Research Paper

<Your Name>

<Your Teacher’s Name>

<Your Class>

August 17, 2018

Many college courses require properly written research papers.  This is especially true in English, Medical Research, Business, and Legal papers. At most colleges, either the MLA (Modern Language Association) Style Guide or APA (American Psychological Association) Style Guide are used.  This is true at Colorado Early Colleges.  As you go through this exercise, you will become familiar with the two styles. Microsoft Office Word 2013 helps make writing a research paper much easier.  Also, Colorado Early Colleges has a guide that may prove helpful in your research paper creation.

There are a few differences between the two styles, but there are more similarities than differences.  Two of the major variations are the number of spaces after a punctuation and the title of the list of reference materials at the end of the research paper.  To make it easier for editing, this paper uses the APA standard of two spaces after each sentence ending punctuation.  One of the tasks for creating a proper MLA research paper is to change these two spaces to just one space.  If you go to the References tab and look in the Citations & Bibliography group, you will see a Style selection that defaults to the APA Style.  Use the drop down menu arrow on the right to see all of your possible selections.  You will notice that APA is on its sixth edition and MLA is on its seventh edition.

The Modern Language Association (MLA) web page has an excellent description of the purpose and goals of the association.  Their main book for describing the style is The MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, seventh edition.  Purdue University has an easy to follow example for the MLA style.

The American Psychological Association (APA) web page describes the purpose and format of the association’s style guide.  I have included a sample APA paper written by Jeffrey H. Kahn, to show you the appearance of an APA research paper.

There are also various ways to add references. They include just the author, the author and the title, just the title, the author and the page, and just the page.  This may be just the subset, but they will take care of most of the needs of citations.

You will make both a MLA and an APA research paper from this report.  A separate file will be given to you to describe the steps you need to take to create both the MLA and APA research papers.  The MLA paper will be created first. When you are finished you will have a good idea of how to create each research paper.