Southern Cultures AUTHOR’S GUIDE
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SUBMITTING A MANUSCRIPT
- Mail manuscripts
to: Southern Cultures, Love House and Hutchins Forum, 410 East Franklin St., UNC-CH CB# 9127, Chapel Hill NC 27599-9127.
- We ask that you
not submit your article to another journal while it is under review
at SC.
- Manuscripts are
returned to authors if requested at time of submission.
- All submissions
are subjected to review by the coeditors and by selected readers.
- If the submission
is published, authors transfer copyright to SC.
Article length: 15–20 pages (3,750–5,000
words)
Review length: 3-4 pages (750–1,000 words)
WRITING FOR THE SOUTHERN CULTURES AUDIENCE
When writing or revising your article for Southern Cultures, please keep
in mind that our readers are from many academic disciplines and the interested
general public. Consequently, we are especially interested in articles
that deal with southern issues in the broadest possible way. We can use
an article on x only if it uses this material to open a larger discussion
on the South. These wider issues are often left implicit in academic history,
but we will need a more direct treatment than you might find in most articles
in, say, The Journal of Southern History.
For our purposes, 15–20 pages or so, double-spaced, is about the
maximum length we are looking for in final copy. Your introduction should
offer our nonspecialist, nonscholarly readers a context for your topic,
but should not survey the relevant historiography in detail. References
and concepts familiar to your discipline will likely need a brief explanation
when first mentioned. Please keep technical jargon to a minimum, as well
as footnotes (endnotes)—we suggest no more than ten to twenty.
Any substantive revisions we might ask you to make to an accepted manuscript
will be in the interest of best communicating with a broad audience.
COPYEDITING
All accepted manuscripts are assigned to a copy editor. In copyediting
your manuscript we seek to make your prose as clear and effective as possible.
Even experienced scholars can be casual in such matters as improper punctuation,
occasional grammatical oversights, and inconsistency in style. Common
problems that turn up in the manuscripts we receive are mixed metaphors,
inconsistent tenses, and excessive use of the passive voice. We will do
our best to reduce wordiness and correct any errors of grammar, syntax,
and punctuation. We do not, however, usually verify the accuracy of your
endnotes; correct information is your responsibility.
You will have an opportunity to review the copyedited version of your
manuscript, which will contain queries, stylistic changes, and suggested
alterations. We regard copyediting as a dialogue in which we hope to offer
you as many suggestions as we can to enhance your essay’s readability
and accessibility without suppressing your voice. We invite you to participate
actively in this exchange.
PREPARATION OF MANUSCRIPTS
Mechanical matters
- Please send
2 copies of your article printed on a letter-quality printer. Please
double space! Leave wide margins (1 ½ in.) to allow room for
marginalia and copyediting.
- Articles should
be 15 to 20 pages in length, excluding notes.
- Notes should be
numbered sequentially and placed at the end of the article using the
endnote function of your word-processing program (more information below).
- The author’s
name, address, telephone number, e-mail address, and affiliation should
appear on a separate title page preceding the text. Also include a brief
biographical sketch.
- Photocopies of
proposed illustrations should be included with the copies of the manuscript.
- A cover letter
summarizing the article’s major points should be included.
Preparing the electronic text
- Prepare your manuscript
on the same system—both hardware and software—from start
to finish.
- Please eliminate
all formatting that is not essential. Although most word processors
now incorporate desktop publishing functions that enable you to produce
an elaborate printout, you should remember that once your article has
been designed and typeset for Southern Cultures it will look quite different
from your manuscript copy.
- Never use all caps
for authors’ names in notes.
- To indent paragraphs,
use only the tab key—not the space bar, your word processor’s
automatic indent feature, or a “style sheet” of any sort.
- Use only one space
after colons and one after periods at the ends of sentences.
- Never use letters
for numbers or vice versa; in other words, don’t type the lowercase
“ell” for the number one or the capital letter “oh”
for zero.
- Align all poetry
passages so that they appear on the manuscript exactly as you want them
to appear in the printed article.
- Please spell-check
your text.
- When sending a
disk, please make sure that it exactly matches the hard copies (printouts)
that you are sending. Send disk files in Microsoft Word. If you are
working on a Mac, try to save the file as a PC file.
Spelling, punctuation, and other matters of style
- For spelling and
word division, follow Webster’s Third International Dictionary
or the latest edition of Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary.
- For capitalization,
hyphenation, use of numbers, punctuation, and other matters of style,
follow The Chicago Manual of Style, 14th ed. (1993).
- Please capitalize
all references to South, but not to southern or southerner.
- Do not capitalize
black and white; do capitalize African American, Asian American, Native
American, etc.
Names
- Give complete name
on first reference to an individual; last name only thereafter.
- Do not use honorifics
(Mr., Mrs., Miss, etc.)
- Neither “Jr.”
nor “III” are preceded by a comma (Joe Doe Jr.; Joe Doe
III)
- Initials indicating
first and middle names are separated by a space (W. R. Valentiner).
Endnotes
- Number consecutively
from 1, but if you are providing a note to your title (e.g., “This
paper was originally presented at a conference . . .”), begin
numbering AFTER that note. The average number of notes is 10 to 20.
- Place the notes
at the end of the manuscript, not at the bottoms of the pages using
the endnote function of your word-processing program. Please double
space.
- All references
must be complete. Please, no “author will supply information with
proof.”
- Please streamline
and consolidate notes as much as possible. There should be no more than
one note per paragraph. The primary purpose for endnotes is to provide
the source citation for direct quotations in the text. Please edit out
textual material in the notes--if you wish that material to be in your
essay, please incorporate it into the text.
- Book reviews should
not have endnotes.
- Consult Chicago
Manual of Style (chapters 15 and 17) for additional guidance on notes.
For a book
- Author’s
full name
- Complete title
of the book
- Editor, compiler,
or translator, if any
- Series, if any,
and volume or number in the series
- Edition, if not
the original
- Number of volumes
- Facts of publication—location
of publication for little-known presses, publisher, and date of publication
- Volume number,
if any
- Page number(s)
of the particular citation
Richard Wright, Black Boy (Harper and Row, 1966), 201.
Valeria Gennaro Lerda and Tjebbe Westendorp, eds., The United States
South: Regionalism and Identity (Bulzoni Editore, 1991);
Allen Wardwell, Objects of Bright Pride: Northwest Coast Indian Art
from the American Museum of Natural History, 2nd rev. ed. (American
Federation of the Arts, 1988), 30.
For a chapter/essay in an edited book
Michael Heale, “Writings in Great Britain on United States History:
Some Reflections on a Liberal Moment, in Guide to the Study
of United States History Outside the United States, 1945-1980, ed.
Lewis Hanke (Krause International Publishers, 1985).
For a journal article·
- Author’s
full name
- Title of the article
- Name of the periodical
- Volume of the
periodical
- Date of the volume
or of the issue
- Page number(s)
of the particular citation
James F. Powers, “Frontier Municipal Baths and Social Interaction
in Thirteenth-Century Spain,” American Historical Review
84 (June 1979): 655.
Cornelius C. Vermeule, “The Rise of the Severan Dynasty in the
East: Young Caracalla, about the Year 205, as Helios-Sol,” North
Carolina Museum of Art Bulletin 14.4 (1990): 30-49.
Unpublished material·
- Author’s
name
- Title of document,
if any, and date
- Folio number or
other identifying number
- Name of collection
- Depository, and
city where it is located
Stephen Walsh, “Black-oriented Radio and the Campaign for Civil
Rights in the United States, 1945-1975” (Ph.D. diss., University
of Newcastle upon Tyne, 1997).
Timothy Habick, “Sound Change in Farmer City: A Sociolinguistic
Study Based on Acoustic Data” (Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois,
1980), Cabell Greet Papers, Columbia University Library Special Collections.
Interview with author·
Interview with Janis Joplin, 2 February 1962.
General rules
- Once a work has
been cited in full, subsequent references to the work should be in short
form. Short reference form consists of author’s last name, a logically
shortened title of the book (or journal article title), and page number(s)
of. reference.
- Ibid. refers to
a single work cited in the note immediately preceding. Ibid. takes the
place of the author’s name, title of the work, and as much of
the succeeding material as is identical.
- Do not use p.
or pp. to indicate references to page numbers unless the number would
be ambiguous without it.
- Use arabic numerals
for volume numbers, even if the title page of the work carries a roman
numeral.
ILLUSTRATIONS
Southern Cultures strongly encourages authors to include relevant illustrations
with their articles. Feel free to call the managing editor with any questions
you may have regarding illustrations.
- Authors are asked
to provide camera-ready artwork (accompanying black-and-white or color
photographs, tables, figures, graphs, etc.) when sending in an accepted
manuscript.
- The author is
responsible for obtaining written permission to reproduce illustrative
materials from the owner of the image. (Call Southern Cultures or see
Chicago Manual of Style for assistance in writing requests.) Photos
will be returned.
- Please provide
captions and credit lines for any illustrations you submit.
FACT CHECKING
Authors are responsible for ensuring that their text and notes are accurate.
The copy editor is not responsible for fact-checking a manuscript. Any
errors that the copy editor happens to discover, however, will be noted
and brought to the managing editor’s attention.
Editorial office phone: (919) 962-0511 e-mail:
southerncultures@unc.edu
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