APA 7 at Liberty University: formatting online course papers

Most Liberty courses ask for the APA 7 student paper format rather than the professional format. The student title page lists the paper title, your name, the university, the course code and name, the instructor and the due date.

The seventh edition dropped the running head for student work. A few Liberty instructors still want it, and when the course says so, the course wins.

Number every page in the upper right, the title page counting as page 1.

An abstract is not part of most student papers, but some Liberty courses and most graduate research papers request one. If your prompt calls for one, give it page 2 by itself.

The body begins on a new page with the paper title repeated in bold at the top, followed by the introduction without a heading.

Pick one readable font the manual allows (Times New Roman at 12 points and Calibri at 11 are the usual Liberty choices), double-space everything, and keep an inch of margin all around.

Sources go on a fresh page under a bold, centered References label, each entry hanging at half an inch.

Save a blank version of a correctly formatted paper after your first course. Starting each new assignment from that file removes most formatting errors before you write a word.

APA 7 uses five heading levels. On a Liberty paper that means main sections centered in bold, subsections at the left margin in bold, and a third tier at the left margin in bold italics.

Most undergraduate papers need only Level 1 and Level 2 headings. Graduate papers and theses use more.

Liberty rubrics often name the sections a paper must contain, such as introduction, background, analysis, application and conclusion. Using those exact words as headings helps the grader find each criterion.

Do not label the introduction with a heading. APA 7 places the paper title above the first paragraph instead.

A conclusion usually gets a Level 1 heading, and many Liberty papers also include a separate heading for the biblical worldview section.

Lists inside a paper should be written as seriation, with numbers or bullets formatted the APA way, rather than pasted from slides.

Tables and figures need numbers, titles and notes in APA style, and each must be mentioned in the text.

Keep heading wording short and parallel. A reader skimming only the headings of a Liberty paper should be able to see the whole argument in order.

In-text citations use the author and year, such as (Grove et al., 2023), with a page number for direct quotes. Works with three or more authors use et al. from the first citation.

Paraphrase is preferred over quotation in most Liberty papers. Long quotes of 40 words or more need block formatting and rarely help the grade.

Each author and year named in your paragraphs needs a partner entry on the References page, and no entry should sit there unused.

Journal articles need the DOI written as a link when one exists. Articles from the Jerry Falwell Library databases without a DOI are cited without the database name.

Textbooks are cited by edition, and the edition matters. A course guide may list a specific edition, and citing an older one can draw a comment.

Government and organizational sources, such as the CDC, CMS or the Bureau of Labor Statistics, use the organization as the author.

Bible verses are cited in text with the version named the first time, and classical religious works usually do not need a reference list entry unless your instructor asks for one.

Secondary citations, where you cite a study you only read about in another source, should be rare. Liberty instructors usually prefer that you find and cite the original through the library.

The most common error is a mismatched reference list: a source cited in the text but missing from the list, or the reverse.

The second is reference formatting, especially capitalization of article titles (sentence case) and journal names (title case, italic).

The third is the title page, where students mix the student and professional formats or leave out the course and instructor.

The fourth is headings that do not follow the levels, such as bold centered text used for every heading.

The fifth is missing page numbers for direct quotes.

The sixth is dated research. A 2012 article formatted flawlessly can still cost points when the rubric asks for studies from roughly the past five years.

The seventh is citing websites where scholarly sources are required. APA format cannot make a blog post count as peer-reviewed.

Liberty's Online Writing Center offers guides, templates and appointments for APA questions. Its APA template is a good starting point for any paper.

The Jerry Falwell Library provides citation guides and research help, and its databases give the DOI for most articles.

Your instructor's comments on early assignments are the most valuable APA guide you will get. A correction marked in week two will be expected in week seven.

Citation generators help, but they often get capitalization and DOIs wrong. Check every entry they produce.

Read the rubric's APA line before you start writing, because it tells you how many points are at stake.

When a long paper lands in a crowded week, a writer here can draft it in seventh-edition form from title page to reference list; it reaches you to check over and upload yourself.

Formatting is easier to get right from the start than to fix at midnight before a deadline.