APA Style: 2.19 Basic Formatting Guidelines (font, spacing, margin, alignment, indentation) (p. 44)

These are the basic formatting guidelines that your paper must meet even before you type something in your main text.

1. Font: The following are the fonts that you can use (Be consistent throughout the paper)
   1. 11-point Calibri (the default of MS Word)
   2. 11-point Arial
   3. 10-point Lucida Sans Unicode
   4. 2-point Times New Roman
   5. 11-point Georgia
   6. normal (10-point) Computer Modern
      1. Font exceptions
         1. Figures: Within figure images, one can use a sans serif font (the first three fonts in the above) with a type size between 8 and 14 points.
         2. Computer code: To present computer code, one can use a monospace font such as 10-point Lucida Console or 10-point Courier New.
         3. Footnotes: When inserting footnotes with the footnotes function of your word-processing program, one should use the default font settings (e.g., 10-point with single line spacing).
2. Line Spacing
   1. Double-space the entire paper (title page, abstract, text, reference list, table and figure notes, appendices).
   2. No extra space before or after paragraphs or headings.
      1. However, in the title page, one “must” add an additional double-spaced blank line between the title and byline.
      2. Also, in the title page, one “must” add at least one double-spaced blank line between the affiliation and Author Note.
   3. Exception of the Double-Spacing
      1. The table body (cells) can be: single- / one-and-a-half- / or double-spaced.
      2. Words within the image part of a figure can be: single- / one-and-a-half- / or double-spaced.
      3. Footnotes: It should be single-spaced.
3. Margins
   1. Use the default margin (1-in or 2.54-cm margins on all sides).
4. Paragraph Alignment
   1. Use the default setting of your word-processing software (“ragged”). That is, align text to the left and leave the right margin uneven (“ragged”).
      1. Do not adjust the spacing between words to make all lines the same length.
      2. Do not manually divide words or hyphenate words at the end of a line.
5. Paragraph Indentation
   1. Use the default setting of your software for the initial indentation at the beginning of each paragraph.
   2. Specifically, indent the first line of every paragraph 0.5 in by using the tab key.
      1. Exception
         1. In abstract, even the first line should be flush left (no indentation).
         2. In block quotation, the whole block should be indented from the left margin 0.5 in. The beginning of the block quotation should not be indented. Only the first line of second and any subsequent paragraphs of the block quotation should be indented another 0.5 in (a total of 1 in).