In this lecture, I'm going to teach you about an important resource from the internet that you'll want to know about when you do your research papers. It's called the Purdue Owl, and I'll explain what that means in just a minute. When you write papers in college, and when you write the research paper in particular, you'll always have to follow some kind of format that your teacher tells you to use. In these courses you've been using MLA format, and that's a common format in American colleges. But there's also the APA format, which is also popular. If you haven't written very many papers, you're not going to remember how to format in either of these formats. I've been writing papers for over 20 years and I don't even remember everything about the formats. And the good thing is you don't have to remember everything, because there are online sources. So here's an example of a paper formatted in MLA format. Remember that you use one inch margins. You have a heading on the left with the name, the teacher's name, the class name, and the date. And then you have page numbers on the top right. Those are only half an inch from the top of the page and you put your last name in front of the page number. Some other things about MLA format are the, you use double spacing. The font should be 12 point and it should be something easy to read like Times New Roman. You've also learned about formatting the work cited page. The work cited page is something in MLA format and it's a list of your sources. You need to put the sources in alphabetical order. This page is also double spaced, work cited entries used hanging indentation that means that the first line of each entry is on the left side of the margin, and then the other lines in the source are indented. You've also already learnt about using in-text citations and how your in-text citation needs to match one of the sources in the work cited page. These are all things that if you've taken all of the courses in this specialization you will have learned, but you may not remember all of these things. Since you can't remember everything, you need to know how you can find the answers when you're writing your college papers and you don't remember how to format something. And that's why I'm going to teach you about the Purdue Owl. The Purdue Owl is an online resource created by Purdue University. OWL means Online Writing Lab, and this is something that's well-known in college classes in the US, especially in English classes. Teachers always tell their students about this website, because it's great for looking up any question you have about formatting either in MLA or APA. So I'm going to show you how to use this for formatting your papers. If you look down it in the bottom, on the left, you can see that there is an MLA guide and an APA guide. You can start by clicking on whichever format you're using for the paper that you're writing. Let's look at the MLA Guide. You see that on this page it gives some basic information about the general format for MLA. Here's where you can see the details about using double-spaced, Times New Roman, 12 pt. Those are the things that I have been telling you about. And if you ever forget you can just go to the Purdue OWL website, and remind yourself. But in addition to that, look over on the left side. There are all of these different topics that have to do with formatting in MLA format. There's a Sample Works Cited page. There's a sample essay. They also show you how to do In-Text Citations in MLA format. For the works cited page, you see that they have the Basic Format. They also tell you how to format books, periodicals, and electronic sources. Electronic sources are the websites that you'll use, and this is what I've already shown you. But it would be impossible to teach you all of these things about MLA format. And it's not necessary to do that because you can look online and find whatever you need. So this is the MLA format styling guide, and then let's look at the APA guide. We haven't talked about APA in this class, and I am no expert on APA. But if I ever took a class where I needed to write a paper in APA style, I know that I can use the Purdue Online Writing Lab to look up whatever questions I have. So here looking at APA, I need to click on APA Formatting and Style Guide, and then you see a similar page to the MLA. This is all for APA. Again, you can see how to do in text citations in APA format. They don't use a Works Cited list in APA. They use a reference list. So you can click here and see the basic rules for making a reference list in APA format. If you've never used APA, you would definitely want to use this resource. Now if you ever forget the name Purdue OWL, it's always easy to find if you just go to Google. And if you have questions about MLA format, just type in MLA format. And hit Enter. And you'll see that the first site that comes up is the Purdue Owl. That's the website that I just showed you. Let's see what happens if I put in APA. Again, the first resource that comes up in Google is Purdue Owl. So you do not even have to remember the name of this, but know that it's a good resource for you when you're formatting papers in college classes. I hope you'll find the Purdue Owl a useful resource for you.
