Since I’ve been in college most of my professors have used have us as students use MLA format for papers or projects involved with their courses. I’ve actually never used APA here in my time at East Carolina University. After doing some research and watching some videos I understand more clearly the differences between the two formats of MLA and APA.

For instance, MLA includes: The date following the publisher in the citation and is not in parentheses, the author’s full name (first and last) is spelled out, all major words in the title are capitalized and the title is underlined, the source page is called a “Works Cited”, MLA uses the last name of the author and the page number, and MLA does not use commas to separate the material, or p. pp. before the page numbers.

While APA includes: an opening page, an abstract page, the title of your paper and page number at the top of every page, the date and name of the author next to each other before using a quote and the page number after, the source page is called “references page”, and APA also uses headers.

The formatting of each style is different but when researching there were many great cites that included: examples, videos, and information of any style of writing you might come across. I do believe this badging pathway will be very helpful not only for this English class but for any course I might take through out my time here at ECU.