APA Style Guidelines - Essay Example

When a fact or aspect of knowledge is considered to be commonly known it is not required that a person document the proof such a fact (Perrin, 2009). The correlation between smoking and lung cancer, for example, is so widely known that one would not need to cite any reference in order to demonstrate proof of such a relationship. This is beneficial to the writer in that it allows them to include commonly known information into a paper without having to identify the proof for any, and all, facts that are included in that paper.

The serial comma is a comma that is used when three or more items are listed, and is located at the end of the series of commas (Becker, 2011). This is helpful for the writer as it can be used to clarify potentially confusing lists of names. Furthermore, it allows the writer to include longer lists of information without creating ambiguity in their writing style. Finally, the APA has released a new way to identify online sources which is called a Digital Object Identifier or DOI (Lewis, 2008).

This DOI allows writers to have continued access to a file once it has been found as this number is permanently attached to this article by an approved agency. This process is helpful in that is negates the need for a URL and retrieval date when citing online sources.