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. !1 STYLE GUIDE: CLST 450 Fall 2016 An em dash (—) interrupts a sentence: “Cicero loved soccer—but that is beside the point.” On a Mac, shift+option+hyphen produces an em dash. In Word on Windows, typing two hyphens should produce an em dash. Whitespace neither precedes nor follows any of these marks. You can use all three in the same sentence: “Cicero—who lived 106–43 BC—invented the game of Greco-Roman soccer.” Justification In typography, “justification” means fudging the spacing between words so that each line of text comes out to the same length. Without hyphenation, this looks awful, and Microsoft Word will ensure that your text looks awful even with hyphenation due to its lousy line-breaking algorithm. Body text should be “ragged right” or “left-aligned” or “flush left” like this document: all lines of text should begin the same distance from the left side of the paper, but they will naturally end at different distances from the right side of the paper, making the right side of the paper look “ragged.” The reader’s eye uses the different line lengths to track its vertical position on the page, so “ragged right” text is easier to read. Margins Use one-inch margins on all four sides of the paper. Numbers Do not use Roman numerals. In citations, use Arabic numerals for all numbers: Cic. Rep. 1.26. In body text, write out as words any number whose corresponding word is only one word long: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty. Use Arabic numerals for any number longer than one word (but see the following for exceptions): 21 (not “twenty-one”), 22 (not “twenty-two”), 99 (not “ninety-nine”). Write out the names of decades and centuries: The twenty-first century was a time of despair for the Romans. In the sixties and seventies, classicists wrote on typewriters instead of laptops. Write out as a word any number that begins a sentence: Augustus had 99 problems, but Ovid was not one of them. Ninety-nine problems beset Augustus, but Ovid was not one of them. Use a comma to separate the hundreds and thousands places in numbers that are not years, but do not use commas in writing years: I received 1,776 pieces of coal for Christmas. The world began in AD 1776. !2 STYLE GUIDE: CLST 450 Fall 2016 Numeric Ranges When writing numeric ranges like page numbers, follow these rules: 1. Always write the ones and tens digit. 2. Only write the hundreds digit of the ending number if it differs from the hundreds digit of the beginning number. Do not write the hundreds digit of the ending number if it is the same as the hundreds digit of the beginning number. from 110 to 220: 110–220 from 110 to 120: 110–20 (not 110–120) from 110 to 115: 110–15 (not 110–5 nor 110–115) Page Numbers Number the pages in the bottom margin, center aligned, with a simple number: 1, 2, 3 etc. Your word processor can do this for you automagically. Passive Voice Good Latin and Greek authors love the passive voice, but good English authors avoid it. In an active sentence, the subject does some action; in a passive voice, something is done to the subject. Popilius betrays Cicero. Active: subject (Popilius) does the action Cicero is betrayed by Popilius. Passive: subject (Cicero) does not do anything Passive sentences are longer, more complex, and weaker than active sentences. You want to write strong, brief, straightforward sentences. The passive voice has only one redeeming virtue in English: it allows you to omit or hide the agent of some action. That may be useful in politics or other fields that encourage one to dodge responsibility, but academic writing requires you to attribute responsibility whenever possible. Quote and Quotation “Quote” is a verb, not a noun. “Quotation” is the noun for something one quotes. He quotes three lines from Juvenal. The quotation highlights Horace’ subtle wit. wrong: *This quote highlights Horace’ subtle wit. // “quote” is not a noun Spacing Double-space the body text of your paper. Footnotes and the bibliography may have single spacing, but you must double-space the body of the paper. Typeface Use only twelve-point Times or Times New Roman. Do not use bold text anywhere. Do not underline anything. !3 STYLE GUIDE: CLST 450 Fall 2016 Italicize titles of books and journals. Italicize foreign words when written in the Latin (English) alphabet. He wrote about philotimia. (foreign, Latin alphabet—italicized) He wrote about φιλοτιμία. (Greek alphabet—not italicized) Primary and Secondary Sources Primary sources are ancient texts (speeches, histories, dialogues, plays, verses, novels, inscriptions, etc.). They were written in Latin and ancient Greek by ancient Romans and ancient Greeks who lived in antiquity and have been dead for a long time. Secondary sources are modern scholarly works (articles, chapters, and monographs) written about ancient texts and the ancient world. Secondary sources interpret primary sources. You want to use recently written secondary sources so that you take the current state of scholarship into consideration: a paper full of references to books written in the seventies will come across as stale and out of touch with modern academic thought. The authors of your secondary sources should still be alive for the most part: try to stick to the twenty-first century as much as possible. When writing a research paper in classics, you write about primary sources by making arguments that also build upon or refute secondary sources. For example, you might write a paper about Vergil’s Aeneid (a primary source). In that paper, you would refer to scholarly articles and books (secondary sources) written recently about Vergil’s Aeneid, and you would draw upon those secondary sources when making arguments about how to interpret the primary source. In general, you will want to quote and discuss primary sources, but paraphrase or just briefly mention and discuss secondary sources. )4 STYLE GUIDE: CLST 450 Fall 2016 Citations Classicists now prefer “inline” citations over footnotes. When giving a simple reference to one text, primary or secondary, do not add a footnote, but use the appropriate format from the sections “Parenthetical Citation: Primary Sources” or “Parenthetical Citation: Secondary Sources” below. You will cite your primary and secondary sources differently: you may be used to the format for secondary sources, but the bewildering variety of formats for primary sources is a sin peculiar to classical studies. Inline Citation: Primary Sources You should quote passages from primary sources to demonstrate your arguments. Give the quotation in English enclosed in double quotation marks (remember to put periods or commas inside quotation marks but colons and semicolons outside them); then, in parentheses, cite the source following the directions below. See the bottom of this section for directions on paraphrasing instead of quoting primary sources. Classical texts generally each have their own system of divisions. Scholars use these as a standard form of citation; do not refer to page numbers of translations of primary sources.