Throughout high school, I was taught and required to use MLA formatting because “that is what college professors would expect”. Definitely not the case when I came to ECU. All of my professors since I entered college have required me to use APA formatting. I have struggled with this because I spent my entire high school career learning and getting use to the ways of MLA and now changing my ways is very hard. However, after watching videos and reading several different formatting “how to’s”, I feel more confident about formatting in APA style. These videos and websites showed me many examples on real papers to help me visualize what my actual paper should look like. I learned the correct way to cite information in text, how to correctly format my references, and how to identify plagiarism. I also learned something interesting from one of the websites I found: quotations should only be used at last resort. I always figured that direct quotations were good to have at least once or twice in papers, but that obviously is not the case. Paraphrasing and summarizing is a much better approach because that way you are putting the information into your own words rather than just using someone else’s. Another interesting fact that I learned was the difference between general and special knowledge. General knowledge is something that does not require research, such as the sky is blue or grass is green. Special knowledge, however, requires some research and requires citation. Reading and listening to these videos definitely cleared up some confusion when it came to APA formatting for me and now I will hopefully be able to format my papers correctly!