ASA - Paper Format Guide

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American Sociological Association style is widely used in research in the field of social sciences. If you are a student of sociology or another field of social sciences, you may be already well acquainted with this citation style. However, as you are on this page, my guess is you are new to this field and the ASA citation style as well. Well, in that case, you are in for a treat. Read this article to know how to format your sociological paper according to the ASA format.

Basic ASA Formatting Guidelines

Whenever an essay writer is using ASA format, you should stick to following general formatting guidelines:

• You should be using a font size of 12 pt. throughout your paper. The footnotes etc. should also be in the same font size.
• The font used in ASA format papers is Times New Rohman.
• All the text of the paper should be double spaced.
• You should set margins to one inch on all four sides of the paper.
• An additional title page should be added in which you provide the name of the author(s).

You should also mention the total word count on the title page.

• An abstract is not a necessary component of ASA papers. However, if required you are allowed to add a brief abstract of no more than 200 words.

ASA Title Page

Everyone first looks at the title page of your paper before looking into it. Therefore, if you want to make an impression on the readers or supervisor, you should make the title page according to the ASA format to give an academic look. The title page of an ASA format paper should include the following elements:

• The title page begins with a running head on the top left side, which is the shortened version of the title of your paper.
• The running head should be in Capital letters and should have less than fifty characters.
• The page numbering starts from the title page. Numbering is in Arabic numerals and on the right side in the header.
• Names of the authors and their respective institutions
• Address of the author (email)
• Total word count
• Acknowledgments to all funders and contributors.

Abstract

It is not necessary but if you need to add one it goes after the title page. It should be precise and concise. It should not be any longer than two hundred words.

Headings

Different levels of subheadings are used to organize the body of the paper. The headings in ASA format are aligned-left. The three levels of headings are used as follow:

1. FIRST-LEVEL HEADING: All the letters of this heading are capital and they signify that it is first-level heading.
2. Second-Level Heading: Here only the first letter of each word is capitalized.
3. Third-level heading: These are italicized and only the first letter is capitalized.

In-text citation

ASA citation style is like APA when it comes to in-text citation. The general rule is that you should add the last name of the author with the year in which the document was first published, in a parenthesis.

Reference page

The reference page is titled as REFERENCES and it is left-aligned. They are also double-spaced like the rest of the paper. Hanging indent is used in references. References are listed in alphabetical order based on the last name of the authors. All first letters except that of prepositions etc. are capitalized.

The use of footnotes and endnote is also allowed in ASA formatting to explain some information from any table or when you cite a source that cannot easily be accessed. Moreover, you can also get help from an essay writing service at reasonable rates.