Style sheet

This guide adheres to the points laid out in the Viewpoint Magazine style sheet and the Chicago Manual of Style. The most recent edition of the CMoS (18th) is linked here (large file).

In particular, here are a few things to keep in mind when copy editing for Long-Haul:

General spelling:

• Please use American spelling, e.g. colonize instead of colonise, or labor instead of labour.

• Exceptions can be made when quoting from a source written in British (or Canadian, Australian, etc.) English

• Italicize all appearances of non-English words

• ​​Fully spell out all acronyms and initialisms when they first appear in the piece.

Spelling of common words and phrases:

• “Rank and file” as a noun; “rank-and-file” when adjectival

• “The working class” as a noun; “working-class” when adjectival (i.e. “working-class politics”)

• “Shoptalk” rather than “shop talk”

• “Shop floor” rather than “shopfloor,” “shop-floor” when adjectival before a noun.

• “Coworker” rather than “co-worker” (CMS)

• “Jobsite” rather than “job-site” or “job site”

• Et cetera should be abbreviated to etc. (period afterwards), whereas i.e. and e.g. have periods.

• Capitalize “Left” when used as a noun, as in “the Left,” “the New Left,” “the Italian Left.” But no capitalization when used as an adjective: “a left-leaning union president.” Same convention for “the Right”

• Use convention “IWW Local 666” when naming a union local, as opposed to “IWW 666,” except when it is convention within the local itself to not use “Local” in the name.

• Spell out “United States” except when adjectival, as in “US labor movement.” Do not put periods between “U” and “S”

• “Anti-colonial” and “anti-imperial” (rather than “anticolonial” or “anti imperial”)

Punctuation:

• Apostrophe and s for the possessive of last names that end in ‘s’ (ex. James’s)

• The hyphen ( - ) connects two things that are intimately related, usually words that function together as a single concept or work together as a joint modifier or phrasal adjective (e.g., tie-in, toll-free call, two-thirds).

• The en dash ( – ) connects things that are related to each other by distance, as in the May–September issue of a magazine. En dashes specify any kind of range, which is why they properly appear in indexes when a range of pages is cited (e.g., 147–48).

• Also use an en dash ( – ), preceded and followed by a space, rather than an em dash (for example, when demarcating a clause in a sentence).

  • E.g.: The goal, Marx wrote, should be to acquire “an exact and positive knowledge of the conditions in which the working class – the class to whom the future belongs – works and moves.”

• Commas: use serial comma in all instances (i.e., a comma between all elements in an enumeration, including a comma before the “and”)

• Quotation marks and punctuation: place periods, commas, colons, and other punctuation marks inside quotation marks: e.g.: “. . . ran into the woods.”

• Ellipsis: use three spaced periods with non-breaking internal spaces.

• Colons:

Quotations:

• In general, a short quotation, especially one that is not a full sentence, should be run in.

• One hundred words or more (~5 lines or more) can generally be set off as a block quotation. Also, a quotation of two or more paragraphs is best set off, as are quoted correspondence (if salutations, signatures, and such are included), lists, and any material that requires special formatting.

  • Do not use quotation marks.

  • Capitalize the first word in the quotation

  • Begin block quotes on a new line, and indent with the word processor’s indentation tool.

  • The first line should not have an additional paragraph indent. If there is more than one paragraph within the extract, however, each new paragraph should begin with an additional first-line paragraph indent, which can be added using the Tab key or your word processor’s indentation feature.

  • Use a hard return only at the end of the extract and after any paragraphs within the extract. Block quotations should have the same line spacing as the surrounding text; they do not need to appear in a smaller font. The text that follows an extract should get a first-line indent only if it constitutes a new paragraph; if it continues the text that introduced the extract, it should start flush left.

Numbers:

• Spell out numbers one through ten and then use numerals. Always spell out a number that begins a sentence (“Nineteen hundred was the year…”).

• All larger numbers are usually given as numerals (see Q&A #1 here)

• Spell out multiples of one through one hundred used in combination with hundred, thousand, or hundred thousand.

• For money, Chicago style is to either use numbers with a symbol (or abbreviation) or spell out the whole phrase, so “€2,000” or “EUR 2,000” or “two thousand euros” would do.

• In main body, use Chicago “xx percent” style (e.g. 30 percent). In footnotes, xx% style is okay (e.g. 30%).

Dates and times:

• Are given in the format, e.g.: July 15, 2008.

• For “AM” and “PM,” use lowercase directly after the numerals (10:30am, 5:30pm)

• For centuries: “19th century,” “20th century”

• For decades: ’60s rather than sixties, etc. Note the direction of the apostrophe.

Footnotes:

• Superscript numbers for footnotes always appear at the end of the sentence, directly after the period.

• Footnotes should be used primarily to provide required citational information (i.e., for a quote from a book, magazine, etc.) They can be used very sparingly to provide critical contextual or editorial information only when it is not appropriate to include that information in the body text.

• In order to facilitate both print and web publication, please include hyperlinks in the body of the text where appropriate as well

• Please adhere to Chicago Style footnotes:

  • • Lucio Magri, The Tailor of Ulm: Communism in the Twentieth Century, trans. Patrick Camiller (Verso, 2011), 263.

  • Chicago 18th ed. (14.30) no longer requires place of publication for books published since 1900.

• Citations of journals with both volume and issue numbers (N.B.: identify number as “no.”):

• Panagiotis Sotiris, “How to Make Lasting Encounters: Althusser and Political Subjectivity,” Rethinking Marxism 26, no. 3 (2014): 398-413.

• Citations of essays/chapters in an edited collection (N.B.: name of editor[s] follows title):

• John D. Kelly, “Seeing Red: Mao Fetishism, Pax Americana, and the Moral Economy of War,” in Anthropology and Global Counterinsurgency, ed. John D. Kelly et al. (University of Chicago Press, 2010), 77.