STYLE GUIDE: CLST 450 Fall 2016
General Notes on Style
Contractions Avoid contractions. Write “he has” instead of “he’s,” and so forth. The mark of punctuation called “apostrophe” in English has two uses in academic writing: indicating possessive case and nested quotation.
Document Header (Title and Author) Start your paper with your title on the first line, centered, in the same typeface and size as the rest of the paper. Do not italicize the title (but do italicize any titles or foreign words it contains). Capitalize the first letter of any word except articles (a, an, the), monosyllabic coordinating conjunctions (and, or, but), and monosyllabic prepositions (by, for, from, to, and so forth). Always capitalize the first word of the title and the first word after any colon or semicolon. On the second line, centered immediately under the title, write your name. Begin your first body paragraph on the next line. You do not need to write the date, my name, the course number, the section number, your ID number, or any of that other nonsense.
Eras
Many American journals now require the use of CE (Common Era) instead of AD (Anno Domini) and BCE (Before Common Era) instead of BC (Before Christ). For our purposes, feel free to use either the BCE/CE or the BC/AD system, but remain consistent: do not switch systems in the middle of a paper. Write the era in small caps rather than full capital letters. No periods follow the abbreviations. One space separates the number and the abbreviation.
743 BC (not “743 BC” nor “743 bc”; not “743 B.C.” nor “743 BC.”)
The BCE and CE abbreviations follow the year:
743 BCE 33 CE
In the traditional system, BC follows the year, but AD always precedes the year:
743 BC AD 33
Hyphenation Do not turn on hyphenation. Do not break words across two lines: if a full word will not fit on the end of one line, keep it whole and push it to the next line.
Hyphens and Dashes A hyphen (-) joins two words or morphemes to make one word: “Greco-Roman.” The hyphen key (between the zero and the equals sign) on the keyboard produces a hyphen.
An en dash (–) separates the endpoints of a numeric range: “106–43 BC.” On a Mac, option+hyphen produces an en dash. In Word on Windows, typing a hyphen between numbers should trigger autocorrect to replace the hyphen with an en dash.