Chapter 1: Preparing Copy

‘Copy’ is material sent in to be considered for publication. This chapter deals with the preparation of copy for submission, editing, and subsequent publication in any medium. As such, it will be of more interest to authors than to students, though writers of dissertations might find some of the advice helpful as a supplement to their university’s regulations for the presentation of theses.

§1.1. Introduction

When preparing a text for publication, the author should take due account of the ‘Guidelines for Contributors’ or ‘Instructions to Authors’ of the journal or series. These will specify the form in which articles or books should be submitted for consideration, and the organization of copy in articles for publication (such as the positioning of abstracts and details of the author’s affiliation).

If you are editing a collection of essays, it is your responsibility to ensure that the style is consistent throughout.

Guidelines for contributors will specify what file formats, media, and methods of transmission (e.g. email, file upload) are acceptable. Contact the editor if anything is unclear. The norm is for contributors to submit Microsoft Word documents.

Copy should be carefully checked before initial submission. All quotations should be checked against originals, and not merely against previous drafts of the work. Authors are responsible for the completeness and correctness of references. Ensure that no extraneous comments or queries are embedded in the file.

§1.2. Preparing the Text

(a) Page layout

Do not overdesign your copy since many typographical effects are overridden in typesetting when the publisher’s own design is imposed.

It is not advisable to use plug-ins in Microsoft Word (such as automatic citation tools) as they may be incompatible with the software used by your editor or typesetter.

To permit legibility of marginal corrections, use double- or 1.5 times-spacing throughout. Use one size of a simple font throughout, including in footnotes or endnotes and extended quotations.

It should be visually clear where a new paragraph begins, either by indenting the text or increased line spacing.

Ensure that page numbering is visible in your document.

(b) Font

Use a serif font such as Times New Roman to avoid confusion of characters such as upper-case ‘I’ and lower-case ‘L’, which can look almost identical in sans serif typefaces such as Arial.

(c) Use of bold and capitals

Large capitals (for instance in abbreviations such as BBC or MHRA) should be typed as such. Small capitals are specially designed capitals, the height and visual weight of which approximate to those of lower-case letters. They are normally used for roman volume numbers, postal codes (but not abbreviations for US states), professional and academic qualifications, ‘ad’, ‘bc’, ‘ce’, ‘bce’, and ‘ah’. They also provide an alternative to italic and bold type in the typographic treatment of subheadings. Where small capitals are required (for instance as volume numbers in references or in postcodes) use the small capitals feature of Microsoft Word, not a reduced font size or full capitals. For further guidance on roman numerals, see §5.3.

Bold should only be used for emphasis in very limited cases, as an alternative to the use of italic, e.g. for highlighting words in the course of lexical analysis. Do not use coloured backgrounds to highlight text.

(d) Headings and subdivisions

Avoid excessive levels of subdivision. Distinguish clearly between headings and subheadings (for instance, by putting headings in bold and subheadings in italics). Capitalize with title case in chapter titles and main headings, and sentence case in sub-headings (see §3.4 for more on title casing). Headings and subheadings should not end with a full stop or colon. For example, a heading and then a subheading:

German Travel Narratives of the Nineteenth Century

Humboldt’s scientific expeditions to Spanish America

(e) Spacing

Double spaces should not be used in normal text, and should be eliminated from your copy before submission. Type only a single space between the end of a sentence and the first character of the next, and following major punctuation marks such as colons and semicolons. In quotations from French, do not put a space before a colon, semicolon, exclamation mark, or question mark.

Do not type multiple spaces to indent the first line of a paragraph, or to indent the margin of a quotation: instead, use your word-processor’s indentation features.

(f) Non-Latin scripts

Quotations from texts written in non-Latin scripts should generally be given in the original script rather than transliterated. Software is widely available for Cyrillic, Greek, and Han (the extensive set of glyphs used to write Chinese, Japanese, or Korean); editors can advise on scripts written right to left, such as Arabic or Hebrew, where computing support is less certain and practical considerations may need to override stylistic ideals. The same applies to left-to-right but unusual scripts, such as Egyptian hieroglyphs.

While quoted material should in general not be transliterated, names of people or places outside of quotations should be. Thus, ‘Gogol′ took up residence in Moscow’, not ‘Гоголь took up residence in Москва’. See §4.1 (b) for place names which have a standard English form; these should be used in preference to a transliteration, where that would produce a different spelling.

Similarly, words or phrases being discussed as such, rather than as quotations, are normally transliterated: thus, ‘Ivan’s division of Russia into oprichnina and zemshchina led to a period now known as the Smutnoe vremia’. Single words and short phrases in languages other than English are italicized. However, words that have passed into regular English usage, such as glasnost or samizdat, need not be italicized. (See §3.7 (b).)

Titles of books, articles, or poems originally written in Slavonic languages (such as Russian, but also Belarusian, Ukrainian, and Bulgarian) should always be transliterated where they appear in discussions or bibliographies, and this must be done consistently, following the same system used for names: see below. In other language areas, conventions differ, and authors should make a pragmatic decision. In cases where an untransliterated title does appear, a translation may be needed to assist the reader. For example, the following bibliography entry might appear in a book aimed at art historians who are not necessarily specialists in Japanese:

Yanaihara, Isaku,  完本 ジャコメッティ手帖 [The Complete Giacometti Handbook], 2 vols (Misuzu Shobo, 2010)

Where possible, use an existing standard scheme for transliteration. For many languages, a standard Romanization table is provided by ALA-LC, a collaboration of the American Library Association and the Library of Congress. These tables are easy to find online and simple to apply: however, ALA-LC does sometimes need to be adapted or extended for scholarly use. For example, in Arabic studies scholars often follow IJMES style.

For Slavonic languages, MHRA style is to use ALA-LC but without diacritics (i.e. without breve, macron, or dot accents). For instance:

Dostoevskii, Chaikovskii, Tolstoi, Evtushenko, Gogol′, Gor′kii, Il′ia

For the soft sign ь use the prime symbol ′ (Unicode U+2032) and not an apostrophe ’. For example, ‘Gogol′’s infamous lectures of 1834’. Similarly, the less common hard sign ъ should use the double prime ″ (Unicode U+2033) and not a double-quotation mark ”.

When writing outside the context of Slavonic studies, for example in a comparative literature article, authors may instead choose to follow common English forms, provided they do so consistently. Thus the following are acceptable:

Dostoevsky, Tchaikovsky, Tolstoy, Yevtushenko

(g) The International Phonetic Alphabet

A special case among non-Latin scripts is the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), used in linguistics to represent the range of sounds which form human speech. It is normal practice to enclose the use of IPA within slashes or square brackets: slashes are used for phonemic notation (denoting the abstract or mental representation of the sound unit) whereas square brackets are used for phonetic notation (representing the actual pronunciation of the sounds). For example, Marcel Proust’s surname has the phonemic representation /pʁust/, but is pronounced [pʁ̥ust], with progressive devoicing of the voiced uvular fricative, /ʁ/, marked by an IPA diacritic. Graphemes, or letters — such as ⟨b⟩ or ⟨a⟩ — appear in angled brackets.

Your editor can advise on software for accessing the full range of IPA characters. All of the material inside the slashes or square brackets should use the same IPA font. The International Phonetic Association recommends that IPA material should never be italicized.

(h) Cross-references

Since they cannot be finalized until the text is typeset, cross-references within an article or book should be typed as triple zeros:

See above [or below], p. 000, n. 000.

Internal cross-referencing, i.e. cross-references to pages within your own document, should be avoided as far as possible, for instance by giving references to chapters, sections, or notes: ‘See Chapter 3’, ‘See Section 4.3’, ‘See Chapter 4, n. 000’, ‘See n. 000’. Use ‘above’ and ‘below’, not ‘supra’ and ‘infra’. Where you need to repeat a reference to the same source, follow the guidelines in §7.12 below rather than cross-referencing to another note. Where internal cross-referencing to a page is unavoidable, cross-references should be carefully checked and marked on the proofs. Do not use Microsoft Word plugins or extension software which embeds citations or URLs: type or copy these in normal text.

§1.3. Incorporating Illustrations

(a) Numbering and placement

Discuss the inclusion of any illustrative material with your editor prior to submission. For all illustrations that are in copyright, you must obtain, from all interested rights-owners, written permission to reproduce in all publication formats (print or electronic), including confirmation of the credit to be printed acknowledging permission to reproduce. Permission documents should be supplied with the illustrations.

All illustrations should be supplied electronically. The appropriate resolution, file format, and means of submission should be discussed with the editor. All illustrations should be supplied as separate files, not embedded within the text. Give each illustration a clear filename that includes the figure number.

Illustrations, usually referred to as ‘figures’, should be numbered. For an article, number from 1 upwards; if a single figure combines two or more images to be displayed side by side (for example, for comparison or to show a succession of frames from a film), individual images should be identified as (a), (b), (c), and so on. Within a chapter for a monograph or edited book, number figures within each chapter: thus Chapter 3 would have Figures 3.1, 3.2, and so on. When referring to an image within your own text, use a figure number, as an illustration may not immediately follow the relevant text, for reasons of layout. For example: ‘Courbet’s painting (Fig. 1.1), begun at Étretat in the summer of 1869, caused a small sensation on its exhibition the following year.’

To indicate where the image should be placed, insert a standalone paragraph at the point in the text where you want the image to appear, consisting of the phrase ‘Figure [...]’, followed by the caption.

(b) Captions

Each figure should have a caption, which will usually be printed beneath it. A caption should begin ‘Fig.’ (note the small capitals), then give the figure number, then a full stop. The caption should identify the image briefly but self-sufficiently, that is, so that the caption alone would be enough to tell the reader what this is a picture of. Visual material is so varied that no single set of rules will cover every eventuality, but the following guidance may be helpful.

For works of art, captions usually follow the form:

Artist, Title (year), materials, dimensions in cm. Gallery or museum (or ‘private collection’). © Copyright acknowledgement if needed.

Artist names should usually be more than surnames (so, ‘Paul Cézanne’, not ‘Cézanne’) but no longer than needed for clear identification (so, ‘Henri Rousseau’, not ‘Henri Julien Félix Rousseau, known as Le Douanier’). If a commonly used English title exists for an artwork (e.g. The Birth of Venus) it should generally be used. Whether or not materials and dimensions are included will depend on the conventions of the particular field of visual study; authors should aim to be consistent across their figures. If giving dimensions, note the use of a multiplication sign, not a lower case ‘x’, and the spaces around it.

Captions differ from notes and bibliography entries in that they may require acknowledgement of copyright; information about rights-owners is omitted from any note or bibliography entry that refers to the same image or to the film or broadcast from which it is taken. If the rights-owners have requested an exact form of words for the copyright acknowledgment, this wording must be used. See §7.9.

Analysis of the image should be placed in the main text, not a caption. If any comment follows, drawing the reader’s attention to something, it should come at the end of the caption and be kept brief.

For example:

Fig. 1.1. Gustave Courbet, La Mer orageuse (La Vague) (Salon of 1870), oil on canvas, 116 × 160 cm. Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Guy de Maupassant later described seeing Courbet pressing his face to the window to look out at this storm, and slapping white paint on a blank canvas with a kitchen knife.

Fig. 1.2. Alberto Giacometti, untitled drawing (1964), lithographic pencil on transfer paper, 42 × 32.6 cm. Published in Paris sans fin (1969), plate 38. © Succession Alberto Giacometti / Sabam, Belgium, 2022. Photo credit: Fondation Giacometti, Paris.

Fig. 1.3. Franz Ludwig Catel, Gulf of Naples (1831) (detail). Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg; on loan from the Kunstsammlungen der Stadt Nürnberg. © J. Musolf.

Where captions are to film or television stills, there is often no single artist, though it is usual to credit a director. The studio or production company (as the rights-owner), and date, should be given in brackets. If positions within a film are needed, they should be given in hours-minutes-seconds format, i.e. HH:MM:SS, or MM:SS for shorter formats. For example:

Fig. 2.1. Jaurès (La Huit Production, 2012), dir. Vincent Dieutre. © La Huit/Cinaps TV.

Fig. 2.2. Solomon Perel appears as himself in the final sequence of Hitlerjunge Salomon (Central Cinema Company Film, 1992), dir. Agnieszka Holland (01:45:27).

Where captions are to printed material, such as book frontispieces, newspaper pages, or cartoons from magazines, give the publication and date. For daily newspapers, the day, month, and year should be given; for magazines numbering their issues, the number and year. For example:

Fig. 3.1. Cartoon in O António Maria (21 February 1884), depicting Guiomar Torresão and the Marquês de Valada.

Fig. 3.2. ‘La crainte d’être apperçue arrêtoit jusqu’à ma respiration’, engraved by L. M. Halbou after Le Barbier l’aîné, in Françoise de Graffigny, Lettres d’une Péruvienne [...] traduites du Français en Italien par M. Deodati (Migneret, 1797). Private collection.

For photographs other than art photographs or photographs of artworks, the caption will normally identify what is in the image, give the name of the photographer (if known and relevant), the year in which it was taken, and the source of the image. A copyright statement should be made where required, using any wording requested by the rights-owner. Be particularly careful to date any scene that shows a historical artefact, streetscape, or landscape that has changed since the image was taken. If it is not possible to date an image or if only an approximate dating is possible, that information may still be of use to the reader.

Fig. 4.1. Information boards at the Nazi Party Rally Grounds, 2003. These information boards were replaced in 2006. Photograph taken by the author.

Fig. 4.2. Dürer House, Nuremberg, as it was in 1930. Stadtarchiv Nürnberg. A 38 Nur. D-18-1.

Since all the source information is given in the caption, it is not necessary also to supply this information in a footnote or endnote.

§1.4. Incorporating Tables

Tables should be prepared using Microsoft Word’s standard table function. It is not normally necessary to supply them as separate files; insert the table in roughly the position you would like it to appear. In your discussion, refer to tables as ‘Table 1.1’, ‘Table 1.2’, etc. Number tables consecutively within each chapter. Supply a title for each table, in the form:

Table 4.1. Narrating instances model for the Comedy, derived from analysis of Inferno i and Paradiso xxxiii.

A table title ends with a full stop. Note that, for reasons of page layout, it may not be possible for the table to be printed in the exact position that you have requested.

Bear in mind, when producing your table, that printed books and journals typically provide less room between the margins for text than your software does. For example, Microsoft Word offers the author a full A4 page on which a very complicated table can be made, but that may be two or three times larger than can fit on a book or journal page.