In academic writings, students are supposed to use the formal writing style, formal language and other things related to academic writings. There are so many things that are followed by the writers for write appropriate and proper writings. In all of the university students are given many tasks of writings to improve their writing skills. Teachers are basically trained them to write their dissertations, thesis and research papers in the last time period of their degrees. Assigning tasks of writing assignments, essays and articles is the best way of polishing the writing skills of the students in a positive way.
There are certain rules and regulations that are supposed to be followed by students while writing their tasks. There are different ways of writing any formal write up. In academic and formal writings, students are supposed to use proper language, grammatical structure and proper sentence structure in their writings. There are some citations styles are available for citing any quote in your text and for citing references in your text from where you have taken your material and so on.
In the field of literature and science people used to use MLA citation style in their thesis and other academic writings. MLA citation format stands for the Modern Language Association. It provides guidelines to your subjects for quoting something in the humanities and so on.
Similarly, the other style of citation is the APA citation format and it stands for American Psychological Association. It is mostly used in the subjects medicine, social sciences, mathematics and so on.
These citation styles or formatting methods always share many of characteristics such as the use spacing and margins. There are certain differences in both of these formatting styles like, you will write works cited in the references used in MLA style and references in APA style. This type of little information can make big differences in your write ups. Normally, students use these two styles very easily in their text like assignments, articles and thesis.
You can also use in-text citation in your text whilst quoting something from some site, books, article or any other source. In APA citation style to do in-text citation you are supposed to write authors last name and the date of publication of the work. You can also write page numbers on it for direct citation of any quote. For instance, (authors’ last name, date of publication, page no.). And in the MLA citation style you will do the same for in-text citation.
With the MLA citation format you are supposed to add a work cited page at the end of your written material with complete references. It should be written alphabetically in the list of resources that are mentioned in your text. In APA format you are supposed to add the reference list or the bibliography in the last page of your text.
Both of these styles are very much important in any written material. So students should use these styles in their texts to avoid plagiarism in their text.