General

Articles should be a maximum of 12,000 words, including references and endnotes.

To protect anonymity during the review process, the author’s name or other identifying information should not appear in the manuscript, and all references to the author in the text or in the endnotes should be cited in the third person.

An abstract of no more than 200 words should be submitted with your essay. Although this abstract will not be published, it may be used as part of the review process.

If you have images, embed them in your Word document. If your essay is selected for publication, you may be requested to provide high-resolution electronic files of each figure or image (TIFF or JPEG files).

Technical

Please submit your manuscript as a Microsoft Word document, not a pdf (.doc or .docx). Your document must meet accessibility standards. To ensure that you are submitting properly formatted Word documents, please refer to these resources:

How to create accessible Word documents
Create accessible Word documents video tutorial

Best practices

  • Align text on the left-hand side and do not justify the right margin.
  • Create a first line indent rather than double spacing between paragraphs. (First line indent tutorial from Microsoft.)
  • Do not insert extra spaces or blank characters to line up or format copy in your Word document.
  • Use the Styles option in Word to create the title of the article as well as for internal headings and subheading. (Do not simply bold headings.)
  • Use endnotes, not footnotes on individual pages.
  • Please use American spelling and punctuation conventions, except when quoting directly from a source using British conventions.

We use The Chicago Manual of Style, 16th edition, for manuscript and citation style, especially Chapters 2 and 15, respectively. Please see our Citation Guide for further information on references and common examples.