American Psychological Association (APA) Style
Based on the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (2001)
Whenever you quote someone else directly, paraphrase someone else’s ideas, summarize
someone else's ideas, report someone else’s statistics, or report a piece of unique information,
you need to cite the source and give its authors credit for their ideas and work (O’Hair, Stewart,
& Rubinstein, 2001). If you fail to do so, it can be considered plagiarism. The nature of the
original source is irrelevant. You need to cite your sources using the same principles whether
they come from a book, an academic article, a newspaper, the internet, or some other type of
source.
How to acknowledge a source if you are using someone else’s exact words: If use the same
words as the original author (or authors) it is called a direct quote and you must communicate
this to your readers. If you are using another person’s words, but fail to indicate that you are
doing so, it can be considered plagiarism even if you include a parenthetical reference at the end
of the passage. As a rule of thumb, whenever you are using more than five of another writer’s
words in the same order as that writer, you should consider it a direct quote and acknowledge the
original writer. To acknowledge the writer, you need to use either quotation marks or a block
quote. The length of the quotation determines which one is appropriate.
If your quotation is less than 40 words long, the other person’s words should be enclosed in
quotation marks and integrated into the rest of your paragraph. If you mention the author’s name
when you introduce the quotation, you should follow their name with the year of publication in
parentheses. At the end of the quotation, you should also include the page number on which the
words originally appeared.
Gerbner, Gross, Morgan, and Signorielli (1994) argue that the kinds of television programs an individual
chooses to watch are ultimately irrelevant because the images of television programming are uniform: “…the
pattern of settings, casting, social typing, actions, and related outcomes…cuts across program types and viewing
modes and defines the world of television” (p. 20).
If you do not mention the author’s name in the sentence, it should be added along with the
publication year to the parentheses at the end of your quotation.
According to the originators of the theory, the type of television programming a person chooses to watch does
not really matter because all television programming tends to communicate the same general message: “…the
pattern of settings, casting, social typing, actions, and related outcomes…cuts across program types and viewing
modes and defines the world of television” (Gerbner, Gross, Morgan, & Signorielli, 1994, p. 20).
If your quotation is more than 40 words, it should be presented in the form of a block quote.
That is, the quotation is formatted as its own paragraph. Each line of this paragraph is indented
five spaces. The page number, along with the author’s name and the publication year (if it hasn’t