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APA & MLA Styles

This guide contains tips for how to maximize your Academic Writer experience plus additional resources to assist with APA style.

Navigating Academic Writer

Accessing Academic Writer

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* You may encounter the following screen. If you access your courses using NCUOne (ncuone.ncu.edu), select “1-1 Students (formerly NCU)” and then log in with your usual credentials.

SSO login selection screen

Academic Writer Punctuation Guidelines

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Punctuation Guidelines

Colons

Learn how to use colons to introduce complete and incomplete sentences, in statistics, in references, and in titles and headings.

Academic Writer

© 2022 American Psychological Association.


Common Punctuation Errors

Learn about common punctuation errors you can identify and correct to ensure your writing is clear.

Academic Writer

© 2024 American Psychological Association.


Commas and Semicolons

Learn how to use commas and semicolons between items in a list, to set off nonessential or nonrestrictive clauses, in parenthetical reference citations, and to separate independent clauses in the text.

Academic Writer

© 2021 American Psychological Association.


Hyphens

Learn how to use hyphens and dashes, including in compound modifiers and after prefixes.

Academic Writer

© 2021 American Psychological Association.


Italics

Learn how to use italics, including in reference list entries and for key terms, scientific names, words in another language, statistics, and tests or scales.

Academic Writer

© 2021 American Psychological Association.


Parentheses and Brackets

Learn how to use parentheses and brackets, including in narrative writing, in-text citations, direct quotations, abbreviations and lists, and mathematical and statistical copy.

Academic Writer

© 2021 American Psychological Association.


Periods

Learn how to use periods in sentences, abbreviations, and reference entries.

Academic Writer

© 2021 American Psychological Association.


Quotation Marks

Learn how to use quotation marks, including for quotations of fewer than 40 words, linguistic examples, stimuli, test items and verbatim participant instructions, ironic comments or invented expressions, and titles of articles or chapters in the text.

Academic Writer

© 2021 American Psychological Association.


Slashes

Learn how to use slashes, including to show relationships between words, in mathematics and linguistics, and when citing republished sources in the text.

Academic Writer

© 2021 American Psychological Association.

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