Formatting is an important part of academic writing because it formally formats the paper as required by the fields. Humanities have a different formatting style than social sciences.

As a student, my biggest fear was to write my essay without accurate formatting because no matter how hard I try, I used to format inappropriately. This inappropriateness often leads to unsatisfactory grades.

Students often feel agitated to learn and use the formatting styles because formats have quite minute details which must be considered while formatting the paper.

There are multiple types of formats and students are often asked by the professors to use them according to the relevant fields. However, students find it difficult to identify and use an accurate format.

MLA and APA formats are the most commonly used formats and most professors ask students to format the papers in these formats. Being an academic essay writer, you must know the basics of these two formatting styles because you’ll be asked to use either of them in every task.

Therefore, students must think of understanding these two formats at least, so that they can easily format their documents accordingly.

This blog will help you in differentiating between MLA and APA formatting styles because this may confuse a lot of students.

If you’re working on something related to humanities or fields affiliated with humanities, you must format your paper according to MLA formatting style.

While, if you’re asked to write a paper related to social sciences, you are supposed to format the paper according to the APA formatting style.

The main difference between the formatting occurs in citation style, title page, header, and most importantly the references.

You don’t need to be worried about formatting because this blog is going to tell you the difference between MLA and APA, and you won’t misunderstand both of them.

Let’s start discussing differences one-by-one.

 

Title Page:

The title page is used as the first page with the professor's, student's, and course's name. The title page is a part of the APA formatting.

In APA format, there must be a proper format with topic name, student’s name, and institutional affiliation.

The important part which students often undermine is adding a header on the title page. For APA students must add a header with "Running head: (SHORTENED TITLE" on the top left side of the page, while page number on the top right side of the paper.

The essay writer make sure the header for the first page is different from the rest of the pages.

When utilizing MLA formatting, students are not required to create a separate title page; instead, they can put information such as the "Instructor's name," "Student's name," and "Course Number" in the top left corner of the page and begin the assignment on the following line.

The heading for MLA formatting appears in the right upper corner of the page as "Last Name (page number)". The header and body of the paper will be identical in MLA formatting.

Quite easy, right?

Let’s move to the next point of difference.

 

In-text Citations:

The essay writing service must have an idea of what the in-text citations are, but let's just revise the concept.

In-text citations are used within the text or writing after quoting either directly from the primary or secondary source or taking the central ideal from the sources.

If students do not include these citations and use outside sources in the paper, this will count their work as plagiarized and may have legal implications.

In APA in-text citation, there must be the last name of the author, publication date, and the number of the page mentioned in the parenthesis. For instance (McCombes, 2013, p. 9), for two authors (McCombes & Smith 2013, p. 9), and three or more authors (McCombes et al.,2013, p. 9)

Make sure to carefully check and re-check the placement of commas, spaces, and parenthesis.

For MLA in-text citation, students must remember that while formatting in MLA format the in-text citation includes the last name of the author and page number in parenthesis. The author's name and page number would be written without a comma with a space.

For instance, (McCombes 9), for two authors (McCombes and Smith 9), and three or more than three authors it will be (McCombes et al. 9).

This is a bit tricky but practice will make you perfect in formatting the documents.

 

Reference List:

In-text citations are used within the text, while the reference list is supposed to be at the end of the document. This list must have all the sources you’ve used in your paper.

For APA the heading for the reference list will be "References" (bold and centered).

Every source must be formatted according to the format mentioned below:

McCombes, S. (2013). A quick guide for citations (3rd ed.). Gayle.

Similarly, for MLA citations, the heading for the reference list would be "Works Cited" in bold and at the left side of the line.

All the references must be cited in this way – McCombes, Smith. A quick guide for citations. #rd ed., Gayle, 2020.

There are very minute differences between both and that’s why students usually mix them and end up inaccurately formatting the document.

These references could be generated by online citation tools but the authentic way is to manually generate each reference.

I hope this blog will help you in formatting the document in MLA or APA format. Still, if you feel any difficulty, you can always contact the essay writing service. They will help you in providing guidance for formats.

 

Practice the formatting and you’ll surely outshine!!!