Harvard Writing Style: Your Brief Guide
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Writing an academic essay requires essential skills, which include the abilities to express your own thoughts and emotions in a specific way. There are several commonly used writing formats and one of the oldest and well-known throughout the world is Harvard style. The Harvard style paragraph outline does not differ much from other types of essay, but it has some rules and standards of writing which you have to follow. Read our guide to know more about them.
Harvard Formatting
Harvard style formatting usually requires that a standard font is used (Times, Helvetica or Courier for Mac, and Times New Roman, Arial or Courier for Windows) at size 12. It is not advisable to use extravagant fonts, colors, italics and underlining. The paper is recommended to be double-spaced. Be sure to italicize movies, books, or magazine titles. Put TV shows, short episodes, poems and short stories in quotation marks. These rules will enable readers to understand properly what you are referring to.
Harvard Writing Style Cover Page
According to Harvard formatting style, Cover Page has to be very specific.
- Write the title in capital letters in the center of the page.
- The author's name is situated about three lines down. Do not write it in capital letters.
- The name of the class is positioned four lines down and the name of your professor is on the line after that.
- The school's name is situated on the next line after professor’s name.
- After it, the city and the state come.
- The last line contains the date.
Harvard Citation Format
In Harvard style cite your sources within the paragraphs by means of using in-text citations. You should put the author's name and their first initial, then the publication year and the number of the page on which this information is.
An in-text citation to a quote from page 37 of a book by Kevin Sharpe would look like this: (Sharpe, K. 2008, 37).
Provide citations for every paraphrase, summary, quotation, or fact which is used by you from an outside source. Failing to do this is considered to be plagiarism, which is a serious academic offense.
At the end of the paper, there is a reference list, where you write your source. Locate it on a separate page and do not forget to title it. Include all details of references alphabetically by author surname.
Here is an example:
All in all, following our guide and enjoying the process of writing will surely help you to make a perfect Harvard style essay. Good luck!