You can find many elements of Virginia style in the Chicago Manual of Style, 14th edition, which is an excellent guide to the mechanics of writing for publication in the United States (note, however, that, like that of most publishers--including the University of Chicago Press--Virginia's house style does not follow the CMS exactly).

In the preparation of your MS, use the Press's standards: For spelling (including diacritics), hyphenation, and italicization (underlining) of foreign words, use the most recent edition of Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, supplementing it with Webster's Third New International Dictionary. If more than one spelling is given for a word, use the preferred spelling--the first in the dictionary entry. For proper names, Webster's New Biographical and Webster's New Geographical dictionaries can be useful. Note that, in general, Virginia prefers original-language spelling of place-names (cities and provinces; rivers and other geographical features): København, Lisboa, München. Naturally, in your MS you should retain diacritics and special letters (á, ø) as in the original. See "Other Languages," below.

Please alert us to any solutions you have devised to unusual problems of style in your MS.

Bias-Free Publishing
The University of Virginia Press, as a member of the Association of American University Presses, strives to ensure bias-free and gender-neutral usage in our publications. In order to achieve some consistency among our titles and to ensure your book will not be outdated before its time, however, we avoid changes urged by the politics of the day. We generally follow style as described in the Chicago Manual of Style; Guidelines for Bias-Free Writing (Schwartz et al., Indiana Univ. Press, 1995) and other manuals provide helpful guidelines for writing accurately and without bias. Be aware that few scholarly publishers--and Virginia is no exception--allow the clumsy "he/she" or "s/he" constructions.

Quoted Material
As the author, you are responsible for rigorously checking all direct quotations against their sources before sending your final MS to the Press. Verify all paragraphing, spelling, and punctuation before submitting the final MS. Chapter 10 of the Chicago Manual of Style, 14th edition, provides thorough guidelines for incorporating quoted material in your MS. Here we offer a few of the basics.

Type an ellipsis--three spaced periods ( . . . )--to indicate an omission within quoted material (do not use your word-processor's ellipsis feature). Where the omitted material includes the end of a sentence, the beginning of a new sentence, or one or more complete sentences, use a sentence period and an ellipsis (end. . . . Next). Ellipses are not used at the beginning of a quotation; use them at the end only if the final sentence is grammatically incomplete.

Retain initial capital or lowercase letters of a quotation as in the original. Do not bracket the letter. These will be changed as necessary during editing, but it is important that we know how the letter appeared in the original.

If you are translating a quotation that is itself a translation, wherever possible find and translate the original quotation, instead. If the original quotation was in English, you must find and use the original English.

Finally, check parenthetical citations and source citations in notes against the bibliography.

Read carefully the section on Permissions and Acknowledgments.

      Typing and Formatting Prose Quotations
Prose quotations of fewer than ten full lines should be run into (continuous with) the text, within double (") quotation marks. Quoted prose of ten or more typed lines (in 12-point Courier with 1-inch margins) should be set as extract, or block quotation. Do not use quotation marks around extract. Do not insert hard returns to create vertical space before or after an extract, since this will throw off estimates of MS length. Use hard returns within the extract only at the end of a paragraph. Indicate the text to be extracted by indenting the left margin 1/2 inch (do not change the right margin): in most word-processing programs this involves formatting a 1/2-inch indent, in others it involves changing the left margin to 11/2 inch (do not use hard returns, spaces, or tabs to create the indented effect). Remember to return the indent to 0 or return the margin to 1 inch after the quotation.

When quoting within a note, run the prose quotation in with the rest of the note, within quotation marks, even if it is longer than ten typed lines. If quoting multiple paragraphs in a note, repeat the double quotation mark at the beginning of each quoted paragraph; use the final, closing double-quote mark only to mark the end of the entire quotation. Bear in mind, however, that extensive quotation in notes is inadvisable.

      Typing and Formatting Verse Quotations
Run in verse quotations of fewer than three lines by inserting spaced slashes ( / ) at the poem's line breaks and enclosing the quoted verse in quotation marks. Format verse extract by indenting the left margin 1/2inch; use hard returns at the end of each line of verse. Use the spacebar within a line to align special text vertically exactly as it appears in the source you are quoting. Do not use quotation marks around extract and do not insert hard returns to create vertical space before or after extract. Retain stanza breaks by inserting one additional hard return. Remember to change the indent back to 0 or change the left margin back to 1 inch at the end of the verse extract.

When quoting within a note, verse quotations longer than two or three lines should be set as extract so that the MS editor can quickly identify the quotation as verse and then make a decision about how to code it. Bear in mind, however, that extensive quotation in notes in inadvisable.

Other Languages
If your MS contains foreign words and foreign-language titles, be especially alert for mistakes in spelling, diacritics, and capitalization. Careful attention to this aspect of your MS is essential--only you as author have the resources to confirm correct representation of foreign names and terms.

When you send the final MS to your acquisitions editors, include a separate list of frequently used non-English names and terms, indicating proper syllabification. This list will be sent with the MS to the copyeditor and to the typesetter.

Foreign-Language Titles
Use these guidelines for foreign book and article titles in your MS. Again, the Press relies on you as author to be scrupulously attentive to these matters.

Underline original titles of published books and place within double quotation marks (no underlining) original titles of published articles, stories, and such. Follow the title capitalization rules of the original language (e.g., in French and Spanish, capitalize first word of main title, first word of subtitle, and any proper nouns).

Follow the first text appearance of a foreign-language (original) title with the translation of the title within roman parentheses. If the translation has been published in English, use the exact translation title as published, and underline the book title or put in quotation marks an article title, using U.S. title-style capitalization. If bibliographic information is not given elsewhere in the MS for published translations, follow the translation title with a comma and the year of publication for the translation.

If a translation has not been published, translate the title for the reader's benefit, using roman type (no quotation marks) and sentence-style capitalization.

If the unpublished translation of a title would merely duplicate the original title (for example, with a name or other proper noun), omit it. If the title of a published translation duplicates the original title exactly, follow the first occurrence of the original title with the translation publication date, for example "(translation, 1919)."

After the first appearance of a foreign-language title combined with English translation, use the foreign-language title only.

      Diacritics and Special Letters
Use diacritics and special letters correctly in all place-names and names of individuals. Insert diacritics for all appropriate lower- and uppercase letters using your word processor's special-characters feature, and provide a list of formatted diacritics with the MS on a separate, unnumbered sheet. Diacritics and special letters that cannot be produced using the word-processing program should be hand-applied to the MS page and repeated in the margin in pencil; add such items to the list.

Epigraphs
Selecting epigraphs, should you want them, requires careful thought; they will require special handling in the MS. To permit balanced design, provide one epigraph for each chapter or none at all. Epigraphs work best when they appear immediately after the chapter title, not buried within a chapter.

Epigraphs should be typed indented: either increase the left margin to 11/2 inch or indent the entire epigraph 1/2 inch from the left margin. Do not enclose the epigraph within quotation marks. Epigraph sources should be minimal, ideally only the author's name (and a short title if necessary); they are never followed by a note number. Thus,

If you wish an epigraph for the entire book, place it on a page by itself in the front-matter file (see Order of MS Elements).

Annotation
Note and bibliographical forms in the humanities and the sciences differ markedly; the Chicago Manual of Style, 14th edition, describes the two forms at length in chapters 15 and 16. An exhaustive array of samples is not possible for this guide, but we represent common forms below.

Gather notes in a separate section, regardless of whether they will be printed as footnotes or endnotes. Virginia, like most publishers, almost invariably sets endnotes. For all single-author MSS, endnotes are gathered in an unnumbered chapter titled "Notes" after the text and before the bibliography, if there is one. On the rare occasion when we intend to set footnotes, we will ask you to put this separate notes chapter after the bibliography. For multiauthor MSS only, place the notes to each chapter immediately after the last page of the chapter; see the Press's pamphlet, The Multiauthor Volume.

There should be only one sequence for notes in your MS. If you are submitting a translation or an edited MS whereby the author had notes in the original and you add your own notes, confer with your acquisitions editor or MS editor to devise a solution.

Number the notes consecutively throughout each chapter; the first note in each chapter is "1."

Type note numbers on the line, preceded by a tab and followed by a period and a space, as in the sample notes below. Indicate arabic chapter numbers and titles before the first note of a new chapter.

If your MS contains notes but no bibliography, long and repetitive citations might be simplified by a list of abbreviations preceding the first note. Confer with your MS editor about the usefulness of this for your particular MS.

An aside about authors' names in bibliographies: use the title page of the work you are citing to represent the author's name correctly, not a bibliography or database. Use first initials only if that is how the author's name appears on the title page. Be aware, too, of the distinction between bibliographic and graphic representation of titles: in bibliographies, titles should be bibliographically correct. For design reasons, title pages often omit punctuation, alter capitalization, and blur distinctions between main titles and subtitles. If you are unsure of how a title should be punctuated bibliographically, refer to the Cataloging-in-Publication data on the copyright page, where the punctuation in the title should be correct. Use U.S.-style title capitalization for all English titles in your notes and bibliography.

      The Humanities: Notes and Bibliography
If your MS is to have both a notes section and a bibliography, the notes section should contain full citations only for those works mentioned in passing and not listed in the bibliography (this is rare). Works listed in the bibliography should be cited in the notes section uniformly and invariably by author's surname, shortened title, and, if relevant, page number or numbers:

If your MS contains a notes section but not a bibliography, a work's first citation in the notes section should contain complete bibliographic information.

If you cite more than one article from a collection, however, the first note citation for the book should contain full bibliographic information for the collection itself. For MSS with bibliographies, full bibliographic information should appear in the bibliography. Such entries should be cited by editor, with full bibliographic information given only there. Note 14 above would then read

Subsequent citations of the work, whether they appear in the same or a later chapter, should contain author's surname, shortened title, and, if relevant, page numbers. This example also shows the correct format for indicating a new chapter in the notes:

Citations should be consistent in form throughout the notes. Use the same general system for shortening all titles. For example, delete initial The and A, always drop subtitle, and use full main title; or, delete initial The and A, always drop subtitle, and use main title, shortened if the main title contains more than five words or so.

If your MS is historical (rather than literary), it is not necessary to include publishers' names as part of the bibliographic information. First, full citations in such historical MSS would include only place and year of publication in parentheses:

Later citations would follow the general humanities style; titles should be shortened, and very long titles may be abbreviated:

Note the careful spacing and punctuation in the standard humanities forms for a first citation to a journal or newspaper article:

Try to annotate the text paragraph by paragraph--that is, only one note per paragraph--if the relationship of the sources cited to the discussion in the text remains clear. Notes should contain primarily annotation (sources), not extensive digressions from the text or lengthy bibliographical lists.

The following examples demonstrate the proper bibliographical forms for citing books and articles in the humanities. Format the paragraphs for a 1/2-inch hanging indent (see the section on typing in the chapter on mechanical preparation of the MS).

For historical MSS citing many pre-1900 works, again, publishers' names can be omitted:

      The Sciences: Author-Date System
For a work in the sciences, including some social sciences, the author-date system is used for reference annotation. Parenthetical references are given in the text: (Jones 1978), or (Jones 1978, 10) if a page number is required. In the reference list at the end of the book (or at the end of each chapter in a multiauthor work), a sample entry would be

Titles of chapters, articles, and the like may be capitalized in the same style as book and journal titles; they would then appear within quotation marks: