As an all-volunteer team, we need your help to compile a consistently-formatted manuscript in a timely manner, and we want to ensure that we do not introduce errors to your line breaks or spacing when preparing the manuscript for layout. Please apply the following formatting guidelines to your accepted work.
Formatting
- Use Times New Roman font, size 12, single spacing.
- Italicize contributor name at the top of the page. Be sure your name appears exactly as you want it to appear in the publication, and exactly as it appears in your contributor bio.
- Skip two lines and then make title bold. No need for all caps, unless as a style choice.
- Skip two lines between the title and text.
Indents and Spacing
- Please do not use the tab key to indent paragraphs or lines of poems. For indentations in poetry, we’d prefer you use the space bar to the desired indent, so that we can be sure we’ve correctly formatted your work.
- Do not leave extra spaces between paragraphs. Indentation is all that is needed to signify a new paragraph.
- Fiction writers, if you wish to indicate a section break between paragraphs, please do so by placing three asterisks centered on the line between the paragraphs in question.
- One space only between sentences.
- Usually poems are single spaced. If a poem requires different spacing, please let us know in your email to us. Please use the ENTER key each time you are moving to a new line.
Punctuation
- Dots and dashes: Be sure that all dashes are properly formatted em dashes. They look like this: word—word. Ellipses are formatted as three simple dots. Add a fourth dot if the ellipsis ends the sentence. No extra spaces between dots, please.
- We use the Oxford, or serial, comma.
- Possessives: For singular nouns that end in -s, add an apostrophe -s (for example, James’s car), unless the name is biblical or from antiquity (for example, in Jesus’ name).
Scholarly Articles
- We use MLA style.
Thank you very much for your help! We look forward to sharing your work with our readers.