College paper formats

When you are writing a college paper, it’s important to create an interesting and impressive work as well as format your essay properly. For some people it may seem that your essay content is more important than formatting, but we suggest making both these parts perfectly. If a well-written work is formatted properly, it turns into a great masterpiece. When you use standard formatting for writing, you show that you understand and fulfill rules. Your professor judges not only your work’s content, but also how you formatted your paper and if you followed all recommendations.

 

Formatting your college paper

Being a college student, you already know how it’s important to format your work according to all rules and requirements. Even if your teacher didn’t ask you to follow the MLA or APA format styles, you still have to fulfill standard formatting. We have gathered some tips for you to follow:

1. Ask your professor about formatting requirements. Teachers are different, some of them can be more picky to instructions about writing essays than others, that’s why you have to make sure you follow their own directions.
2. Use a simple well-readable font. Set margins for 1 inch on all sides. Don’t use the font smaller than 11 pt, because it would be hard to read. We suggest using 12 pt Times New Roman, Arial or Verdana font.
3. In the upper left corner of your work you should type your full name. On the second line you should also type there your class name, and the third line should contain your professor’s name (make sure you spelled it correctly!). On the fourth line you have to type the due date of your work.
4. Center your paper’s title on the page.
5. Put page numbers at the upper right corner of your work.
6. After you finished, assemble all pages carefully and staple your work at the upper left corner. Make sure your paper looks neatly and clean.

           

Your college paper structure

It’s better to use a “sandwich” structure for your paper, where the body part is placed between the conclusion and the introduction, like a real sandwich. Needless to say that if the one of these three parts is written poor, your whole work wouldn’t sound good. That’s why you should plan your time beforehand and spend enough time working on each of these parts. Don’t start from the introduction, because this is the most important part of your paper that should grab your readers’ attention, so you should write it at the end. Start from the body part, then write a logical conclusion and only then go to the introduction. Usually the body part contains three paragraphs, but you can write more if needed. On our website site.com you can find many useful tips about writing each of paragraph of your college paper.

 

MLA style

Your professor can require writing your work in MLA format. Here are some main instructions for this style:

– title page – not required;

– font – 12-point, well-readable (Times New Roman is preferable, but feel free to use any           other well-readable font);

– double-spacing;

– margins – 1 inch for all sides;

– header – place it in the upper right corner of your paper, type there page number and your   name;

– citations – according to requirements, you have to start with the author’s last name. Don’t        forget to note the page number that contains the citation you used in your paper.

If you are interested in more detailed instructions for this format, you can find all the needed requirements here: https://yourwriters.net/blog/how-to-format-an-essay-in-apa.

 

APA style

If you have to write your paper in the APA format, follow instructions below:

– title page – should contain your work’s title and the author’s full name;

– font – 12-point, well-readable (Times New Roman is preferable, but you can use other font);

– double-spacing;

– margins – set 1 inch for all sides;

– running head – should be placed at the top of each page (the length of the header should be           less than 50 characters).

If you want to get more detailed information about the APA style requirements, feel free to visit this page: http://www.write.com/writing-guides/style-guide-writing/apa/.

Whether you are writing your paper in the APA or MLA format, we suggest printing out all the needed instructions and keep them behind your eyes, so you won’t forget or miss anything.

We hope that our tips were useful to you in writing and formatting your work according to the teacher’s requirements. If you need more interesting tips about writing your college paper, visit our website site.com and find a lot of useful information we’ve gathered for our readers. Improve your writing ability and create brilliant and successful work to impress your college professor.