StudentHacks.org

So it’s like 3 a.m. and you’re trying to finish your paper. You’re almost done, but you forgot where you left your APA Style Guide. No worries. We have some online APA style guide cheat sheets that you can use right now:

APA Formatting Tips from Purdue
Purdue University offers a comprehensive review of everything you need to know about APA style. This website offers not only great instruction, but also helpful pictures to demonstrate how to use the various APA rules.

APA Research Style Crib Sheet Project
This website archives a bunch of handy APA rules that you should definitely check out. It provides an excellent summary of how to format and write your title page, references, and abbreviations.

APA Online Tips
The official APA website doesn’t provide very many free tips because they want you to buy the book from them. However, they do offer some free tips on APA word usage and hyphens.

APA Citation Help
How do you cite multiple authors again? Or what about citing televisions shows or interviews? This website answers all those common questions.

APA Style Essentials
This might be one of our favorite APA sites. It’s written and maintained by a professor of psychology. He not only lists all the major APA rules, but he includes a downloadable pdf to show you exactly how to do it. Very useful.

Templates for Research Papers
This site offers free Microsoft Word templates for MLA, APA, CMS, and CBE. It’s a quick way to get your paper styled correctly.

Citation Machine
Citation Machine allows you to input the information from your book, journal article, magazine, newpaper, or anthology . . . and then it spits out the correct APA format.

If you find any other handy APA cheat sheets on the web, please send us an email or leave a comment here. We’ll add it to the list.

Before submitting any paper to an instructor, make sure and check your paper for plagiarism. You may have plagiarized without even knowing it, so here are some steps you can take to protect yourself:

Submit a Google Alert
Google Alert (currently in Beta) scans the web for any content similar to what you’ve written. Right now, you can submit up to 256 characters of text per alert (and up to 1000 alerts). This means you can submit random sentences from your paper and find out if there is any similar content in Google’s database.

Use Article Checker
Another free service to check for plagiarism is Article Checker. This website will allow you to submit your entire paper, and will give you some pretty good results very quickly. It’s not as thorough as Google Alerts, but still worth doing.

Know the Rules
As always, it’s good to review all the rules regarding plagiarism so you don’t make some innocent mistakes. Purdue University has several articles to help you avoid plagiarism. Check them out.

As an English Literature major in college, I had to read 4 to 5 books per class. This meant that within a 10 week quarter, I would have read over 20 novels. It was a lot of work, but here’s a technique I used to help me analyze the books quickly:

1. Read the Plot Overview First
You can find plot summaries of most books online. I recommend checking out sparknotes.com, cliffnotes.com, or wikibooks.org. Plot summaries can give you a general understanding of the plot before opening the book. It will spoil the ending for you, but it will help you focus on the major plotline while reading.

2. Read the Themes, Motifs and Symbols
Sparknotes.com offers a Themes, Motifs and Symbols section for every book within its database. This will give you a snapshot of the major themes to watch for. If you know the themes and symbols ahead of time, you can start highlighting any reference in the book that relates to that theme.

3. Underline, Highlight and Write Notes
After you know the plot and major themes, you’re ready to start dissecting your book. As you study, start underlining the key passages that relate to the major plots and themes within the novel. Then make sure to catalog all your notations on a separate piece of paper. Write down page numbers and a brief comment of why that page or section is important to the main theme or plot you’re studying. This will be extremely helpful when you start writing a report or essay about the book.

4. Read Journal Article Abstracts
If you have time, it also helps to search for journal articles about the book you’re reading. I don’t mean start reading through dense journal articles. That takes too much time. I just mean that you should skim journal article abstracts so that you know what scholars are thinking about the book you’ve just read. Simply visit Google Scholar and type in the name of your book. Read the article abstract to give you ideas of what to write about.

Lastly, if you really don’t have time to read the book at all, then start reading through chapter summaries from sparknotes.com or cliffnotes.com. It’s not the best choice, but it will give you some preparation prior to a test or writing an essay.