Style Sheet

(written with Dr Mary S. Lederer, writer and editor at Mafoko Manuscript Services)

We like unusual perspectives, unconventional styles, and new ideas. That said, we are also an academic journal, and we follow academic guidelines. We have put together this style sheet to guide contributors in a few of the tenets of academic rigour, and to give an idea of how far we can fiddle with them.

  • Any source that is not credited contributes to plagiarism, in which a writer passes off others’ ideas or versions of others’ ideas as their own. We recognise that intellectual endeavour is built on the work of others, but it is important to show whose ideas influenced you and to acknowledge their contribution to your intellectual development. Most academic work ties into a network of ideas and of research. You are doing the same thing, and it is important to show who influenced you and how.

  • Any time you use someone else’s words, you have to put them in “quotation marks,” in order to show that someone else wrote them. You have to quote accurately, and you have to indicate clearly to your readers where those words can be found. You want your readers to be able to find this work so that they can engage with your network; this is how networks are created, strengthened, changed, and even disassembled. When you quote someone directly, in quotation marks, with a citation indicating page and source (a paper, book, blog, etc., and including all the relevant details so that a reader can trace the material), you are building a list of references. This list contains all the material you have quoted (or cited).

  • This kind of source is more general and often much more broad. These are writers and thinkers who have influenced you but whom you are not directly quoting. For example, a sentence such as “Most summaries of Bessie Head’s life are based on Gillian Stead Eilersen’s definitive biography of her, Thunder Behind Her Ears, which clarifies Head’s origins” does not cite Eilersen’s work directly, so the book from which this point (rather than quotation) comes from would be included in a bibliography rather than in a reference list, because Eilersen’s general ideas and argument are referred to in a broader way in the thoughts of the writer herself.

  • A paper can have both a reference list and a bibliography, or just a reference list. Very seldom, and only with very good reason, does a paper have only a bibliography.

  • The format that Passage uses to organise references and bibliographies (and discographies and filmographies, as appropriate) is the Chicago Manual of Style (CMOS or Chicago). Chicago is flexible, but it also gives a very solid frame that makes it easy for readers to follow up on ideas, quotations, audio-visual materials, and so on. The basic points of Chicago are online, and copies of the physical manual are often in libraries. CMOS will tell you everything you need to know about how to cite pretty much everything. In general, Passage follows CMOS with footnotes and bibliography, but we also understand that there are some things that might not fit exactly. Check with us if you have a question or request.

  • In general, Passage prefers UK spelling, but if your identity is connected to a different English (US, Canadian, Australian, African), we understand completely, and we can accommodate that. Just let us know.

  • We do insist on a few style points:

    • Quotations are enclosed in quotation marks, not printed in italics. Italics are for other things.

    • Primary quotation marks are double quotation marks. If you have a quotation within a quotation, then you nest your quotation marks by “using ‘single quotation marks’ within the primary quotation.”

    • Final punctuation also is enclosed within the final quotation marks, both double and single, “like ‘this.’”

    • A footnote is inserted after the quotation marks.

    • An em-dash is the kind of dash you use in order to emphasise something—like that. An en-dash is used by itself to punctuate a number range, such as years, as in 1939–1945. When people type, they often use one hyphen (-) to indicate a hyphenated word, two hyphens (--) to indicate an en-dash, and three hyphens (---) to indicate an em-dash. If you use this convention in your manuscript, we can very easily change to Passage’s preferred style: a hyphen for standard hyphenated words, an en-dash for number ranges, and a spaced en-dash (an en-dash between two spaces) for an em-dash – like that. Passage prefers the spaced en-dash – because it is more visually elegant.

    • An ellipsis is the three dots that indicate either hesitation or that something has been left out of a quotation. Here is how you do both:

      • Bessie Head believed that the “only […] God […] is man.” (Text has been left out of the quotation.)

      • My sister hesitated; “I don’t know…Mom seemed pretty upset.” (The writer is not leaving something out; the speaker expresses hesitation.)

    • The Oxford comma is the comma before the “and” or “or” in a series (red, blue, and yellow). Without it, there can be some lack of clarity: “I dedicate this book to my parents, Ayn Rand and God.” You can clarify this statement by doing one of two things, and the comma is by far the easiest.

      • “I dedicate this book to my parents, to Ayn Rand and to God.”

      • “I dedicate this book to my parents, Ayn Rand, and God.”

Like most rules, these points are intended to organise a community to everyone’s best advantage, as much as is possible. If you would like us to bend the rules because there is particular reason for it in your thought as expressed in your writing, let us know, and we can probably find a solution that satisfies the rigour of intellectual work without compromising your own intellectual undertaking.

For examples and more information, have a look at previous issues of Passage here.

For those who are interested in the theoretical aspects and underpinnings of referencing (and you may be just the type, since you have read this far), we recommend Katherine McKittrick’s “Footnotes (Books and Papers Scattered about the Floor),” in her collection Dear Science and Other Stories.