Introducing the Concise Guide to APA Style (7th ed.)

The Concise Guide to APA Style (7th ed.) is APA’s official APA Style resource for students. It’s shorter and lighter than the Publication Manual yet contains everything students and other writers need to succeed when learning APA Style and writing their first APA Style papers.

The questions students have about writing and formatting papers are different from those of researchers writing for publication in a journal. The Concise Guide is designed for students in high school or college who are writing their first APA Style papers and need to know the fundamentals.

The Concise Guide to APA Style includes

• paper formatting guidelines (title page elements, margins, page order, line spacing, font, etc.)
• a sample annotated bibliography
• a sample student title page
• a sample student paper
• streamlined format for heading levels
• sample tables and figures
• writing style and grammar guidelines
• bias-free language guidelines
• guidelines for avoiding plagiarism and self-plagiarism
• complete in-text citation and reference formatting guidelines
• in-text citations and reference templates and examples for more than 100 types of works

We recommend the Concise Guide for high school students and students in college-level courses who may be writing their first APA Style papers. These guidelines can be used by students in a variety of courses, including psychology, business, nursing, engineering, social work, English, and others. Everything students need to write papers with precision, concision, and accuracy can be found in the Concise Guide. All of the examples and guidelines in the Concise Guide match those in the Publication Manual (7th ed.) and thus reflect APA’s values of diversity, inclusion, and accessibility.

The Concise Guide omits advanced content that is more pertinent to authors writing professional manuscripts (e.g., a sample professional paper, research reporting standards, details about the publication process). This chart has a detailed comparison of the Concise Guide to APA Style (7th ed.) and the Publication Manual (7th ed.).

We designed the seventh edition APA Style guidelines, as outlined in the Publication Manual (7th ed.), to address the needs of both student and professional writers. The changes and updates reflect reader feedback—from students, researchers, and many others who look to APA Style for writing guidelines. The Concise Guide to APA Style contains all of the guidelines that students need, and we believe the tailored presentation and organization makes it easier for students who are new to APA Style to learn and apply these fundamentals to their writing. After all, students are “important members of the scholarly community. … by writing papers students engage in critical thinking, self-reflection, and scientific inquiry and thereby prepare to make unique contributions to the repository of knowledge” (American Psychological Association, 2020, p. 1).

American Psychological Association. (2020). Concise guide to APA Style (7th ed.). https://doi.org/10.1037/0000173-000