hello everyone my name is Danny French again from East Carolina University’s Writing Center and today I’m going to talk about in this video how to organize the body paragraphs in your APA paper so let’s get started the paragraphs following the introductory paragraph would typically start the body of your paper there are typically many paragraphs in your paper depending on the length of your paper if you are doing a research paper you will mostly be providing research you have done we’re talking about research others have done if you are only using the APA format for other types of papers most paragraphs will be ideas you want to talk about or supporting paragraphs giving examples to an idea mentioned in the previous paragraph an example would be having a paragraph about the statistics of how many people have OCD and how that relates to your topic and then you could have a supporting paragraph after that with an example about what people experience when they have OCD why you typically have many paragraphs in the body of your paper one important thing is your transitions between paragraphs and sections transitions are words or phrases that help your reader keep up with you while reading your paper if you have one paragraph about bears and the next paragraph about salmon runs in Alaska you still need a transition to get your audience to bridge the gap between the two if your main topic is about wildlife in Alaska then you could transition with the phrase another animal that lives in Alaska other than the brown bear is the saleman followed by the parenthetical citation with the author’s last name a comma and then the date here the parenthetical citation is missing a comma and you only put the year instead of the month in the day for the date as in other in-text citation formats for such as MLA this ties your previous paragraph to the next paragraph and to your original topic all in one sentence so in addition to these main points about the body of the paper there are some other formatting points that I want you guys to know about when writing your paragraphs there are many formatting issues you also need to take into consideration before turning it in your paper would typically be in Times New Roman 12-point font the main text of your paper has a first line indent of 0.5 inches which you can do either by tabbing the first line over or by highlighting the text and going into the paragraph settings and changing them to the first line indentation Microsoft Word also has a default setting of adding space between paragraphs you can correct this easily by going into the paragraph settings and removing the space after the paragraph to zero points all right that is all for this video I hope you all enjoy the video today and I look forward to seeing you and talking about page headers and quoting a an APA style in the next video