How to Create a Header in APA

Most science papers written today use APA style, maintained by the American Psychological Association. APA style offers guidelines for formatting, spelling and laying out your paper, making it easier for readers to read and understand the content without figuring out style and formatting questions. Papers written in APA style must have clear titles, subtitles, footnotes and headers. Fortunately, it is easy to set up most of these styles, including headings, in a word processing program such as Microsoft Word.

Instructions

    • 1

      Open Microsoft Word.

    • 2

      Select "File" from the main menu, then "New" to open the Template Selection dialog.

    • 3

      Select "Blank Document" to create your document.

    • 4

      Select "Insert," then "Header" to make the document header editable.

    • 5

      Press the "Caps Lock" button on your keyboard. Headings in APA style are capitalized.

    • 6

      Type a shorter version of your document title in the header. Typically, if you have a section of the title after a colon, you would leave this out of the header to shorten it.

    • 7

      Press the "Caps Lock" button a second time to deactivate Caps Lock.

    • 8

      Select the title you just wrote.

    • 9

      Click the "Left Align" button to verify that the header will line up along the left margin.

    • 10

      Create a tab stop at the right margin by clicking within the ruler at the top of the page close to the right margin.

    • 11

      Press the "Tab" key to move the cursor to the tab stop.

    • 12

      Select "Insert," then "Page Numbers" from the main menu to open the Page Number Format dialog box.

    • 13

      Choose a "Number Format" for your page number.

    • 14

      Select your "Page Numbering" options. For this example, choose "Start At" and enter "1" in the empty field.

    • 15

      Select "File," then "Save" or click the Save icon to save your document.

Learnify Hub © www.0685.com All Rights Reserved