APA Formatting Tool

If you have ever submitted a dissertation, thesis, or research paper and gotten it back with more formatting comments than content feedback, you are not alone. APA 7th edition has rules for nearly every visual element of your document, and most graduate students spend years mastering their research only to get tripped up by margin widths and comma placement in the final stretch.

The rules fall into four categories. Document setup covers margins (exactly 1 inch on all sides), line spacing (double throughout, with no extra before/after paragraph spacing), font, and page numbers. These apply whether you are submitting a seminar paper or a 200-page dissertation. Headings govern how you organize your document. APA requires five heading levels used in sequence, and you can never skip a level. In-text citations have their own rules around parenthetical ordering, number formatting, and when to spell out "and" versus using an ampersand. References follow strict formatting for italics, punctuation, and URL presentation that differs from every other style guide.

None of this reflects the quality of your research. But catching every violation across a document you have been writing for weeks or months is genuinely hard, whether that document is a 15-page literature review or a 300-page dissertation. That is exactly what StyleMyPaper is built for.