Custom essay writing service

Essay Format

This post furnishes a concise list of document and citation formats for three widely used academic styles: that of the Chicago Manual of Style (known as CMS, and common in the humanities), that of the Modem Language Association (MLA, common in literature), and that of the American Psychological Association (APA, common in the social sciences).

Essay Format

Essays should be stapled or paper-clipped in the upper left corner. Don’t fold or tear pages to hold them together -that’s like shouting, “This essay wasn’t very important to me!”—not a message you want to send. Most college instructors don’t like binders or plastic covers. Essays should be typed or printed on blank white 8 ^1/2” by 11″ paper. Common fonts include 12-point Times Roman and Arial. Print in black ink.

Use one-inch margins on all sides (except for the page numbers). The essay should be double-spaced throughout (including quotations, notes, and the list of works cited, except where exceptions are noted below), with no blank lines between paragraphs. The first line of each new paragraph has a left-indent of a half-inch. Paragraphs are left-justified. In the days of typewriters and non-proportional fonts, it was common to put two spaces between sentences to improve readability. But if you print from a computer, just one space between sentences (and elsewhere) will work well (do a global scarch-and-replace when you’re done, to get rid of the stray spaces that creep in).

Page Numbers

Place page numbers a half-inch from the top or bottom edge of the paper, flush with the right margin. Type your last name before the page number, except for APA style, which requires as a manuscript header the first couple of words from your title placed before the page number. If you have a title page, count it for purposes of pagination. Don’t print the page number on the title page, except in APA style. Word processors can do all of this automatically.

Italics or Underlining

Both italics and underlining convey emphasis and are used for the titles of books. Use one or the other and be consistent. (Don’t use bold face, except for headings of sections or figures.) Use italics or underlining for foreign words or words you are pointing to as words:

Machiavelli also uses virtu in its traditional sense of goodness or morality.

Yoga and yoke derive from a common Sanskrit root.

Some foreign words have made it into common English usage and don’t take italics. If you’re unsure, consult your dictionary. Using italics for emphasis should be avoided in academic writing.

Title and Identification

Your essay’s title (usually between seven and fifteen words) should not be italicized or put in quotation marks (though if you are giving the title of a book or essay, or using a quotation in your title, then formal those words accordingly). The title should be more than a bare-bones identifier (not “Essay #1” or “Essay on Management“). It should signal to the reader what your essay is about:

Mysteries of State: An Absolute Concept and Its Late Medieval Origins

"Hell Strives with Grace": Reflections on the Theme of Providence in Marlowe

As these examples show, titles often consist of two elements joined with a colon — typically, one of the elements is general or creative, and the other is more specific.

APA style requires a separate title page. Other formats leave it to the instructor’s discretion. Short papers in the humanities usually don’t have separate title pages.

Corrections

Sometimes you will discover mistakes in a final draft, with no time to print out a corrected version. In such cases, you should strike through the mistake and write the correction above the line in question, marking the insertion point with a caret:

The World Bank was established in 1947. 1945

it’s usually okay to turn in an essay with one or two such corrections.