House Style Guide

In addition to following the basic guidelines for formatting and layout of your manuscript, here are some supplementary house style mandates to consider before submitting your work:

  • Use standard American spelling and usage, the only exception being within the context of a direct quote when you should reproduce the text you are citing exactly as it appears.
  • Use a single space after a period.
  • Italicize foreign words consistently.
  • Translate non-English quotes immediately following the quotation in brackets (e.g. “que sera sera” [what will be, will be]). If you lead with the English translation put the original language in brackets instead.
  • Use a tab and not extra spacing to indicate paragraph breaks.
  • Use dashes to indicate compound words (e.g., high-risk).
  • Use en dashes to note a range of numbers, such as pages or dates (e.g. 2–13).
  • Include the tens and ones digits for all page ranges (e.g., 34-37, 102-09; NOT 34-7)
  • Use em dashes to set off phrases in a sentence—like this—by typing two hyphens followed directly by the next word in your sentence; the em dash will appear after you insert the normal space following the double hyphens.
  • Use double quotation marks for all quotes, including to indicate when a word is being used as a term (e.g., “othered”) or to define a term (e.g., unheimlich, meaning “uncanny” or “weird”); use single quotation marks for quotes within a quote.
  • When using quotation marks for purposes other than citing quotes from your sources, place all punctuation EXCEPT colons and semi-colons within your quotation marks (e.g., what we really need to discuss is the relationship between “might” and “right,” not the definition of either term on its own).
  • For block quotations, use the indent command and not multiple tabs or spaces.
  • Spell out numbers one to ninety-nine.
  • Spell out centuries (twentieth, not 20th). The adjectival form requires a hyphen (twentieth-century novel). Do not insert an apostrophe in dates (1660s, not 1660’s).
  • Insert your ellipses manually as three periods with a space on both sides of all of them (eg., . . . ).
  • Do not capitalize titles or institutional names unless they are part of specific, official names (e.g., the king versus King Henry or the church versus the Church of England).
  • The first reference to an author in your prose should include his/her/their name; subsequent references can use last names only.