The American Psychological Association (APA) style is, originally, a set of rules that authors use when submitting papers for publications into the journals of the APA.
These are not “rules” but common sense criteria. Additional criteria for selecting examples will depend on the largely topic and nature of this essay.
An engineering or paper that is pure-scientific make use of hypothetical cases, either well-known within the field or constructed specially because of the author, to show the principle being discussed. Such examples ought to be complete and coherent; as facile as it is possible without getting trivial; requiring as little supporting material that you can to show the core principle, thus preventing distraction.
A practice-based topic (such as medicine, law, social work or business studies) should usually use real and referenced cases to illustrate a point. This usually requires much more extra information than will be acceptable for examples various other fields, but this might often be resigned to appendices. Read more
