By taking Advance Placement courses in high school, writing in MLA format has not been anything new for me in college; however, the transition in the recent years from MLA to APA has been different. I went to a summer math and science program during my junior year summer of high school, and we had to write a research paper in which we used APA format. That is when I was first introduced to it in 2012, but I have no true continuous practice, and we have been drilled to write in MLA all our K-12 lives, so this transition in college will be semi-difficult.

It makes me happy however that we are now incorporating it into our college writing assignments because all major publications in my field of science use APA, thus I will benefit from the practice of it right now in this English course, so the hard work to master this new citation technique will be worth it in the long run.

My only fear is that if I make a mistake in the structure of how I do my in-text citation, I may be penalized for plagiarizing unintentionally. I want to learn how to properly cite, but the fear of messing up cripples me to progress sometimes because I do not want to get into legal trouble. It would be great if their were links to websites that help breakdown the structure of an APA style paper in a more mundane way. Purdue OWL is very comprehensive, but hard to really understand.