Dissertation Formatting Help: APA-Style Headings Explained
Why APA Style Requires Headings
The headings in APA Style aren't arbitrary: they've been carefully designed to help your reader make their way through your work. As Chelsea Lee explains at the APA Style Blog, headings give your writing structure. They're like road signs: they tell your reader where they are in your dissertation.
APA Headings are Hierarchical
When you look at a paper, dissertation, or article written in APA Style, you'll see a few different types of headings. These headings are hierarchical. As Lee explains, headings “not only tell the reader what content to expect but also speak to its relative position within a hierarchy.” What does it mean to say that headings are hierarchical? It means that the headings will indicate the importance of the sections, and whether the material that follows each heading constitutes part of a larger section.
APA Heading Levels
The 6th edition of the APA Publication Manual includes formatting instructions for five different heading levels.
Heading level one looks like this:
APA Style Heading Level One
It's centered, in boldface, and words are capitalized.
Heading level two looks like this:
APA Style Heading Level Two
It's almost the same as level one – but flush left instead of centered.
Levels three through five are where things get more interesting. Heading level 3 looks like this:
APA style heading level three.
It's indented, in boldface, and ends in a period; and words are not capitalized.
Here are heading levels four and five:
APA style level four.
APA style level five.
Like level three, they're indented, end in a period, and words are not capitalized. Level four is in bold italic type, while level five is in italic type.
Where Your Paragraph Should Start
When you use heading level one or two in your dissertation, your paragraph should begin below the heading, indented and on a new line. When you use level three, four, or five in your dissertation, you don't begin your paragraph on a new line. Instead, it starts right after the period that ends the heading.
How To Choose Which Heading Level to Use
The heading levels that you use will depend on how many sections your document or dissertation has. If you're writing a dissertation chapter that has five main sections, each of those sections would get a level one heading.
Now, say one of your sections has two sub-sections. Each of those sub-sections would get a level two heading. And then imagine it went a step further: a sub-section has sub-sections of it's own. Each of those would get a level three heading – and so on. The Purdue University Online Writing Lab does a good job of explaining how this works. Most of the time, you won't need more than two or three levels of headings.