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APA Style (7th ed.)

How to create a document and cite using the most recent edition of APA.

APA and PowerPoint

There's nothing particularly special about an APA presentation: unlike essays, there's no special way to structure your PowerPoint.

The main thing is to follow APA format for your citations.

  • You need a References slide at the end of your presentation (or multiple slides, if you have many sources).
  • Individual slides all need APA style in-text citations where appropriate (i.e. anywhere you've used information not original to you).
  • Best practices for PowerPoint and other presentations still apply: this is not a paper pasted into a slideshow. You should still make use of short, concise bullet points and images or other graphics to develop an engaging presentation.

 

In-Slide Citations

Though written essays are kind of the default format -- or at least, incredibly common -- you do still need to worry about citations when creating presentations, movies, infographics, or other types of works! The only thing that doesn't apply is all the 'Times New Roman size 12 double-space' formatting rules.

You do also have more flexibility in how and where you include citations, too!

Presentations

You can use traditional parenthetical citations, especially if you've used multiple sources on one slide.

Slide with 2 bullets. Each has an APA in-text citation at the end. Slide content is deliberately blurred to emphasize the citations.

You can also go less formal [unless your professor has said otherwise!] by tucking the citation into the corner of the slide (Greene, 2010).

Slide content is deliberately blurred to emphasize the APA in-text citation at the bottom-right

You must also include a References slide! We can use hanging indents, but it's not strictly necessary. A bulleted list might also work in this situation.

References slide showing 2 sources in APA style

Movies

Annotation added to movie with citationYou can add a formal parenthetical citation at the appropriate times in your video in some corner of the video.

Recommendation: wherever you place it, keep it consistent! E.g. if the first one is the bottom-left corner, make all the citations in the bottom-left corner. This helps your reader know where to look as well as to know what that pop-up means each time it appears.

There's no rules about size/font/format! Just pay attention to how it contrasts to your video's background.