Essay Format Styles

   When writing papers or essays you are most likely to use other sources other than your own ideas. Every time you want to use information taken from another source, you must acknowledge the author. Sometimes you are not directly quoting from the book or an article, however material that helped you to write your essay was written by someone else thus needs to be recognized in a citation. When documenting sources you are giving references in your paper recognizing appropriate parts as ones taken from resources being quoted. There are a few methods of how you can record it: footnotes, endnotes, or in-text notes taken in parenthesis. You also need to list your references on a separate sheet in the end of the essay. This sheet is referred to as bibliography.

   There are different citation styles and format of your citations will depend on which one you have chosen.
Four major, most common styles are for academic writing in various fields:

   1. MLA (Modern Language Association) style is used for writing for literature, art, and humanitarian courses. 

   2. APA (American Psychology Association) is required in papers written on psychology, sociology and other social sciences.

   3. Turabian and Chicago are mostly used in writing history papers.

In college you will be specifically told which style to use when writing for different classes.