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Your name here

Name of the course

The date of your submission

General Introduction

Your paper or story starts here. This handout serves as an example of standard submission formatting for almost all literary and academic journals. This handout aims to prepare you to submit work for this class and for publication after class ends. It is based on recommendations from The Chicago Manual of Style. All papers and stories must be typed and double spaced. Most of your work will be submitted electronically online as a .doc or .docx file, but if you ever need to print out a paper, please make sure that it is stapled. Please use a legible, serif font like Times New Roman. Use font size 12. Please include one-inch margins on all sides. When submissions have a required word count or page length, the cover page rarely counts toward that word count or page length.

By indenting new paragraphs, the text will be clearer and the reader’s experience will be smoother. Make sure to check all of your work for typos before submitting it. New sections usually have headings that are bold. I would also recommend including an extra space between sections. New sections with headings are commonly used in nonfiction articles and academic papers. Section II of this handout will provide more information about submission formatting for these genres of writing. Fiction typically does not include a bibliography and may or may not include section headings. Section III of this handout will provide more information about submission formatting for fiction writing.

Formatting Requirements Specific to Academic Papers

Generally, the titles of novels, plays, poetry collections, long epic poems like The Faerie Queene, and nonfiction books should be italicized. The titles of short stories and poems like Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy,” should be placed in quotation marks. Please note that if you refer to or summarize a work, even if you do not quote specific lines from that text, I would still like you to cite this work in the bibliography. You will find the bibliography on the last page of this document.

Citations of source material are required. The Chicago Manual of Style requires footnotes as well as a bibliography. Footnotes typically only appear when you are quoting a specific line from a text. Please note that the formatting of the citation in the footnote will be slightly different from the formatting of the citation in the bibliography. The author’s name will appear differently, for example. In general, footnotes rely heavily on commas and bibliographies rely heavily on periods. While the bibliography will also be double spaced, the indentation will be different. Please make sure that your bibliography is in alphabetical order and that it is double spaced.

Perhaps you would like to include a line of text from a primary source and you notice that the original line of text includes additional quotation marks within it. You are going to use single quotation marks instead of double quotation marks where those additional quotation marks appear inside the quotation. For example, I would prefer that you not rely on Wikipedia as a source, because “it is ‘not a primary source’ and that ‘because some articles may contain errors,’ you should ‘not use Wikipedia to make critical decisions.’”[footnoteRef:1] For more information, I strongly recommend reading the rest of this article online using the URL found below. [1: Mark E. Moran, “The Top 10 Reasons Students Cannot Cite or Rely On Wikipedia,” Finding Dulcinea: Librarian of the Internet, October 27, 2011, http://www.findingdulcinea.com/news/education/2010/march/The-Top-10-Reasons-Students-Cannot-Cite-or-Rely-on-Wikipedia.html ]

Perhaps you would like to include a long quotation that runs more than three lines in length. Then you will need to include a block quotation. A block quotation involves indenting the text by half an inch on the left side. You also do not have to include quotation marks at the beginning and end of the block quotation. Please remember to double space the text within the block quotation.

In New Documentary: A Critical Introduction, for example, film theorist Stella Bruzzi argues that documentary images never represent reality.

A documentary will never be reality nor will it erase or invalidate that reality by being representational. Furthermore, the spectator is not in need of signposts and inverted commas to understand that a documentary is a negotiation between reality on the one hand and image, interpretation and bias on the other.[footnoteRef:2] [2: Stella Bruzzi, New Documentary: A Critical Introduction, (New York: Routledge, 2000), 4. ]

After the block quotation, you will typically want to continue writing in the same paragraph so that you can analyze the quotation. Notice that if I am writing in the same paragraph after the block quotation, then I do not need to indent the first line after the quotation.

Are you unsure how to cite a specific short story published in a large collection edited by multiple people? Well, fear not. I will give you an example from “Sonny’s Blues,” a short story written by James Baldwin that is featured in the collection 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories, which was edited by Lorrie Moore and Heidi Pitlor. Baldwin writes, “He was a man by then, of course, I wasn’t willing to see it.”[footnoteRef:3] Please note that if a book or article has three or more authors or editors, you can get away with using “et al.” after the first name in the footnote. Also note that the bibliography includes the entire range of pages in which the short story is featured in the collection. [3: James Baldwin, “Sonny’s Blues,” in 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories, ed. Lorrie Moore and Heidi Pitlor (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015), 199. ]

What happens if you are using the same source multiple times? If you quote the same source back to back, you can use the abbreviation “Ibid” in the footnote. So let’s say that I want to quote another passage from the same short story by James Baldwin. Baldwin goes on to write that “All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it.”[footnoteRef:4] Note that only the page number has changed in the footnote. [4: Ibid., 207. ]

But what if you quote one source, then quote a different source, and then go back to the first source? Well, after you have referenced one source, you can use a short-hand in the footnote when you refer to it again. In the book I mentioned earlier, for example, Stella Bruzzi argues that “narration-led documentaries. . . posses a dominant and constant perspective on the events they represent to which all elements within the film conform.”[footnoteRef:5] Notice how the footnote is abbreviated. [5: Bruzzi, 42-43. ]

When in doubt, you can always check The Chicago Manual of Style, which is available online at http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org.

Formatting Requirements Specific to Creative Writing, Specifically Short Stories

In terms of style, there is greater flexibility when submitting a creative work. You should still check the submission requirements for specific agents and editors. Some editors may wish to read submissions “blind,” for example, meaning that they do not want the writer’s name to appear anywhere on the manuscript.

Short stories typically only include block quotations when the writer wants to convey the text from a letter, email, or other work.

“Should new lines of dialogue be indented?” you may ask.

“Yes,” your teacher will tell you. “New lines of dialogue should be indented as well. If a new character is speaking, you should also put their text in a new indented line.”

“But what happens if a character speaks for a long period of time?” you may ask. “What happens when a character quotes someone else while they are speaking?”

Your teacher will say, “Let’s say a character is telling a long story and they need to start a new paragraph. Then you would just start a new paragraph with quotation marks at the beginning of the new paragraph to signify that their speech is continuing.

“Please note that you do not need to end each middle paragraph of their speech with a quotation mark.

“If a character is quoting another person in their dialogue, then you will use single apostrophe marks inside the quotation marks. For example, Mark Twain said, ‘I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.’ Hopefully, these examples are clear,” your teacher will conclude.

All essays that discuss external sources will include a bibliography (see the following page for an example). A personal essay, such as a story about your life that does not refer to any external sources, does not need to include a bibliography. Most short stories, poetry assignments, and dramatic writing assignments will not include a bibliography unless it is necessary to cite sources referred to in the text.

Bibliography

Baldwin, James. “Sonny’s Blues.” In 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories, edited by Lorrie Moore and Heidi Pitlor, 181-210. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015.

Bruzzi, Stella. New Documentary: A Critical Introduction. New York: Routledge, 2000.

Moran, Mark E. “The Top 10 Reasons Students Cannot Cite or Rely On Wikipedia.” Finding Dulcinea: Librarian of the Internet. October 27, 2011. http://www.findingdulcinea.com/news/education/2010/march/The-Top-10-Reasons-Students-Cannot-Cite-or-Rely-on-Wikipedia.html

Plath, Sylvia. “Daddy.” The Poetry Foundation. Accessed August 25, 2017. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48999/daddy-56d22aafa45b2

Spenser, Edmund. The Faerie Queene. London: Routledge, 1843.

The University of Chicago. “Notes and Bibliography: Sample Citations.” The Chicago Manual of Style Online. Accessed August 25, 2017. http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/tools_citationguide/citation-guide-1.html