Monday, September 28, 2015

Guide for In-Text Citations of Movies in APA Style

APA (American Psychological Association) method of citing sources in Social Sciences is very common. Students are supposed to submit term papers at the end of every semester and they are critically examined by the professors for plagiarism and source detection. If you’re a student of any such field you must have gone through the long hours of reviewing and writing researches and then scratching your head in order to cite the sources according to the demanded pattern of your professors. Here is a guide on how to cite the movies in your papers with APA styling.

Firstly understand the basics of APA. Citation & referencing is usually used for books, journals and other published material. In that case author’s surname is followed by year of publication, and sometimes the page number writer of the research paper is referring too. These all are written in a bracket & separated by a comma for example (Peter, 1990, pg#61). Learn this basic method of citation and proceed further. When citing a movie, we use the dialogue in inverted commas as a direct quote. This is similar to the use of a sentence from any published source.

Director/Producer name: In case of citing a movie you will have to use the surnames of director/producer followed by the year your referenced movie was released. If you want to clarify further, you can also add the name of the scene in place of the page number (as done for books).

Movie name: Another method used for in-text citation of movies is to use the name of the movie and the year of release, for example (Titanic, 1997). This is comparatively more convenient method of citing movies and will be clearer to the reader as well.

Actors and characters: You can also use the name of actor/character who has spoken the dialogue if that is the reason of fame. In APA styling we must use the reference as past tense so when quoting a dialogue write it as; Johnny Depp stated ‘’not all treasure is silver and gold mate’’ (Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, 2003)

Timestamp: Timestamp is another very effective method that can be used to cite a movie or any other visual material. In place of author name you just have to add the timestamp along with the name of the movie/director/actor in APA style. 


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