Essay formats are sometimes the most frustrating part of any academic writing, and APA (which stands for American Psychology Association) seems like no exception. Knowing exactly what this format wants from you and following the rules exactly is difficult. Luckily there are some basic recommendations on how to use APA properly in your dissertation without stress and without hassle.
A simple Google search will bring up multiple examples of any format you should need, and this format is no different. This has to be your first step, even before you start writing your dissertation. Read and understand what is expected of you in the APA style. Write down examples of books, papers and websites from a sample bibliography, so you have examples of each to hand to refer to without going back and forth to Google all day. Once you have a good grasp of what the format means and what it looks like, you can start writing your dissertation.
The most frustrating part of writing a dissertation comes after the main body of the text. For the most part, students are relatively comfortable with researching about, reading on and actually writing down their work. However, after all that is done, you have to start to stress about everything else - table of contents, list of tables and the pages they appear on and, of course, the bibliography. This, of course, is where it is important to understand APA. The best way to complete the bibliography is to note the references of the books you use as you go along. Then, once everything else is done, make sure that you have listed them in the bibliography according to the correct format. That saves the stress of doing it all at the end when you may have forgotten some of the things you referenced!
If, after all this, you are still confused, or don’t know how to put a particular reference into the APA style, simply ask someone! It can be a fellow student, your tutor or someone else that regularly writes in this format. It doesn’t matter! Just make sure you ask them well in advance of when your dissertation needs to be handed in, so you are not stressing out about it. Then just follow their advice, make sure it fits with the rest of the items in your bibliography, and there you go!