Scholarly Style Guide
Please do not be intimidated by the following directions! If you need help with any item, contact Dr. Bernadette Waterman Ward at bward@udallas.edu. If you do the following, we can get the University Scholar to the press on time and have it out before finals!
On your cover sheet, you must include the following information so we can find you:
- Title of Piece
- Author
- Category (scientific, creative, or scholarly essay)
- Telephone number
- E-mail address
- UD post office box number
Works should be no longer than 8 pages, double-spaced. Always submit a paper copy, and an identical text file, either on a disk or as an e-mail attachment.
Formatting
- Use paragraph formatting, not tabs, to indent.
- If you use Microsoft Word, turn off the "fast save" option before you finally save the document you are submitting (Tools/Options/Save -- unclick "allow fast saves").
For Scholarly Essays
- Please keep diagrams and charts to a minimum.
- Use MLA works cited format, not footnotes!
- Make sure all items in the Works Cited list are in alphabetical order.
- If you make use of supplementary notes with further explanations, they must be endnotes, not footnotes.
- Make sure all citations are complete; do not leave out publication dates, page numbers, or any other essential information. Otherwise, we have to try to find this information (usually impossible).
- Do not capitalize a phrase following a colon.
- Capitalize divine pronouns (e.g. He, Him, His, One). Do not capitalize relative pronouns relating to God (e.g. who, whom, whose).
- Use the serial comma (Kant, Hegel, and Kierkegaard).
- Hyphenate all compound adjectives appearing before a noun (well-wrought urn).
- Singular possessives all take apostrophe -s except Jesus, Moses, and Greek names of more than two syllables ending in -es, as per the Chicago Manual of Style (Jesus', Moses', Demosthenes', but Zeus's, the fox's, Phares's, Charles's, etc.).
- Leave ONLY one space after a period, not two.
- When ending a sentence with an abbreviation, do not use an extra period (Washington, Lincoln, Taft, etc. NOT Washington, Lincoln, Taft, etc..).
- Do not use single spacing for block quotations. Double space as in the rest of the text.
- When citing only two or three lines of poetry within your text, use the slash mark (/) and leave a space both before and after it.
- Do not use Roman numerals in citations; use Arabic numerals (Othello 1.2.24-32).