Speaker 1: What's up guys. My name is Chelsea Seaborn. Welcome to my APA Made Easy video series, where I'm slowly breaking down all of APA's, you know, fun, not difficult at all to learn concepts. Today being a tutorial on how to set up your academic papers using Google Docs. I'm also going to show you how to create a template of the paper we create today. So be sure to stick around to the end of the video. Now, two quick things. If you're using Microsoft Word, I have this exact video created. There is a link in the description. And number two, while you're down there, be sure to download this free APA guide. That's going to demonstrate everything I'm teaching you today, and a little more. So the way this tutorial is going to work is that I have the completed paper on the left-hand side of the screen, and we're going to be building out the APA formatting on the right. The first thing we need to talk about is general formatting, specifically your margin. So your entire paper should have the exact same border. If you're using Freedom Units, it's going to be a one-inch margin. If you're using the metric system, that's going to be 2.54 centimeters. Now, the good news is this is the default setting in Google Docs. However, it's worth mentioning that if your margin is off for some reason, the simple way to fix it is to hover your mouse over that margin, hold it down in which you would drag until you're at the desired length. Since our margins are good as is, the first official thing I recommend setting up is your line spacing. Per APA 7th edition, your entire document should be double-spaced. To set this, you have two options. One, you can use the format drop-down menu here from the header, or you can use your toolbar for easy access, where you're going to find the same options from the formatting drop-down. So I'm going to go ahead and go to line and paragraph spacing, select double, and we're good. The second thing I recommend formatting are your page numbers. Here, you also have two options. You can either select insert from the header window, go down to page numbers, and select the option where the page number is in the top right-hand corner. My personal favorite, however, is to simply double-click in the header window, select options, and from here, you're going to choose page numbers, apply, and there you go. Now, you're not quite finished, because by default, your page number is going to be set to Arial, size 11. You want to make sure this matches the rest of your paper, which I'm assuming a lot of you are going to be using Times New Roman with a 12-size font. So with the number one highlighted, go ahead and select Times New Roman, 11, and then you can simply double-click anywhere on your paper, and your page number is set. But with that, let's go ahead and set the font size and type for our document. Now, technically, APA formatting will accept a few different types. However, Times New Roman size 12 seems to be a universally accepted font size and type, so let's go with that. To change it, you simply want to go to the font type, select Times New Roman, and then we're going to click up once, so it's at a 12-point size. But that officially concludes our general formatting, meaning we can move on to the elements on our title page. There are six different things you need to think about. One, a title for your paper, your name, your affiliation line, your course information, your professor's information, and then finally, your due date. To get started on this, go ahead and select the centering option to bring your cursor to the middle of your paper. If your double spacing is already set, like I've showed you, I recommend hitting enter roughly five or six times to bring your cursor to the middle. From there, we're going to go ahead and type out our title. As you can see from the completed paper, your title should be in bold font. So to bold your font, you can either hit Control B or Command B, depending on if you're using a Mac or a PC, or you can select bold from your toolbar. From there, go ahead and type out your title, which should be a few key phrases or keywords that capture the essence of your paper. If you have a subtitle, what you're going to do is hit enter one time and type out your subtitle below like that. Our paper does not have a subtitle, so I'm going to erase that. And from there, we're going to move on to including our name. To do this, you want to hit enter twice so that there is a gap between your title and your name. Next, you want to unbold your font and then type out your name, including your first name, middle initial, and last name, like you see it is there. Next, you're going to type out your affiliation line, and this line should include two things. One, the department you're associated with. So for example, I got a business degree, therefore it is the Department of Business. And two, your university information, which is simply the name of your university. You want to hit enter again, just that one time, and then type out those two elements. I'm going to copy and paste mine because I realized my keyboard's a little loud. Next, we have the course information, which to get started, go ahead and hit enter. And then you're going to include the course code followed by a colon and the name of the course. If you're unsure what this information is, this you can usually find on the outside of the door if you're taking physical classes, or it's going to be printed on your syllabus or your online portal if it is an online course. Next up, you have your professor's name. Go ahead and hit enter. And then my only note here is that you want to include it exactly as your professor refers to themselves. So it might be doctor, it might be professor, it might be something completely different, but just make sure that you match the naming convention that they follow. That brings us to the final element on your title page, which is going to be the due date for your paper. For this, you simply want to format it as the way you would format a date in your country. Since I am in the USA, that means I'm going to format it with the month, day, comma, followed by the year. But with our APA title page good to go, this means we can move on to the next two sections, which is going to be formatting our main body and our reference list. Now, what I recommend doing to make your life super simple is inserting a page break directly after your due date. So as you can see, my cursor is flush against the last portion of that due date. I'm going to come up and select insert from my header in which I'm going to select break and then page break. As you can see, that brought my cursor to the first line at the top of my next page. From there, go ahead and copy your title and then paste it directly where your cursor is on that first line. The reason for this is that because for APA 7th edition, you're no longer typing the word introduction for your paper. Instead, you're going to start your introduction by copying and pasting your title like you see I did there. From here, I recommend inserting another page break so that you can set the formatting for your reference page. As you can see, it did the same thing, brought us to the top line of the next paper in which to format your reference page, you're simply going to type out the phrase references like that. The reason I suggest doing this is because those page breaks will freeze your reference list as the last page in your paper. So for example, I can come up here to my main body, I can start typing some of the content and as you can see the references, it didn't move at all. And so this is really convenient when you're adding your reference list entries as you're writing your paper. Again, it'll save you time in the long run and also because we're going to save this as a template in just a few minutes. The last thing we need to do before we save that template is go ahead and set the hanging indent for the reference page. And so what you're going to do is hit enter once, go ahead and unbold your font and bring your cursor back to the left-hand margin. From there, come up to the header window, select format, align in indentation options, which you can see indentation options here at the bottom. What you're going to do is under special indent, select hanging, and then you want to make sure it's hanging by 0.5 inches, select apply, and then now your reference page is ready for those reference list entries. Now I do have another life-saving note when it comes to formatting your reference list entries. The formatting we just said is going to work if you're typing out your reference list entries from scratch, like you see I'm doing on the screen there. As you can see, when I ran out of room on that top line, it automatically indented that hanging indent for each consecutive line afterwards. However, let's say that my next reference entry I'm copying and pasting it from somewhere else. What happens is it doesn't follow the hanging indent. And so the quick fix is to simply highlight this full reference list entry, and then we're going to use the ruler to change the margin. First, you're going to hold down the left indent, bring it in one half inch, and then hold down the first line indent and bring it back over to zero. So it's important to understand how to use both of these tools when it comes to formatting your hanging indent. But now that means the formatting for our paper is officially set. We're going to get rid of this text here, and now let's go ahead and save this as a template. So Google Docs doesn't have a designated option to saving a document as a template. However, here's your workaround. What you're going to do is you're going to come up here to file, you're going to select make a copy, you're going to find wherever you want to save this on your computer. I'm going to say this folder is fine. So I'm going to give my template a name, something like this, and then select make a copy. And there you go. And so now we have this pre-made APA formatted document where every time we write a paper, we would need to go to the location where we saved that copy. And then it's as simple as making a new copy each time, opening that copy. And then what you're going to do is edit all the details to fit that new paper you're writing. Now, if you found this tutorial helpful and you need help with other aspects of APA formatting, remember that this is a short video in a long series called APA Made Easy. You can check out the other topics in the link below. Also, if you are here and you need help with APA referencing, which I find a lot of you do, I am offering free access to an on-demand webinar where I walk you through APA referencing, how to build those reference list entries, as well as an entire section where we work through practice problems together as a group. If you'd like to learn how to sign up for that, there is also a link in the description titled APA Referencing Made Easy. But with that, I'll see you in the next video.