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You might ask, what do you mean by general knowledge? These are things that most people know. For example, most people know that freedom of speech is part of the First Amendment to the American Constitution. You don't need to cite that. If, however, you are talking about a specific court case involving freedom of expression, and you want to use some of the information from that court case, you would need to cite it.
Note: If you are summarizing the entire article, you do not need to provide a citation.
According to Jones (1998), "students often had difficulty using APA style, especially when it was their first time" (p. 199).
Jones (1998) found "students often had difficulty using APA style" (p. 199); what implications does this have for teachers?
Note that the date follows the authors name, and you use p. in front of the page number. Also, the in-text citation follows directly after the quote, even if the quote ends in the middle of the sentence.
She stated, "Students often had difficulty using APA style" (Jones, 1998, p. 199), but she did not offer an explanation as to why.
Notice that because the author's name was not used, the citation now includes not only the page number, but the author's name and date of publication.
Note: The examples above are courtesy of the OWL at Purdue and can be found via this link.
When you have 40 words or more for a quote (which is roughly 4 lines or longer), you will need to use a block quote. A block quote is indented. You will use the indent arrows on your toolbar to do this. The author and date conventions are the same as above, but the in-text citation itself now goes after the period at the end of the quote.
APA formatting can be very confusing for students, especially if they were taught MLA formatting first, which has different conventions and emphases than APA formatting. In addition, some instructors still use APA6, instead of APA7, and this can be very problematic, as the cover page has actually changed. There are now guidelines specifically for a student's cover page and for a professional's cover page. In particular, the "Running head" is no longer part of the convention for APA formatting. There are still many familiar aspects, however, such as the emphasis on the date of the publication and the author. In addition, the p. is still used for the page number. So, many of the changes are in the way in which a student might formulate the cover page. (Garcia, 2017, p. 161)
Note that the block quote is still double-spaced.
