General Chicago Format Guidelines

• Text should be consistently double-spaced, except for block quotations, notes, bibliography entries, table titles, and figure captions.
• For block quotations, which are also called extracts:
  • A prose quotation of five or more lines, or more than 100 words, should be blocked.
  • The Chicago Manual of Style (CMOS) recommends blocking two or more lines of poetry.
  • A blocked quotation does not get enclosed in quotation marks.
  • A blocked quotation must always begin a new line.
  • Blocked quotations should be indented with the word processor’s indention tool.
• Page numbers begin in the header of the first page of text with Arabic number 1.
• Subheadings should be used for longer papers.

Major Paper Sections in Chicago/Turabian

Title Page

• According to Turabian style, class papers will either include a title page or include the title on the first page of the text. Use the following guidelines should your instructor or context require a title page:
  • The title should be centered a third of the way down the page.
  • Your name, class information, and the date should follow several lines later.
  • For subtitles, end the title line with a colon and place the subtitle on the line below the title.
  • Double-space each line of the title page.

Main Body

• Titles mentioned in the text, notes, or bibliography are capitalized “headline-style,” meaning first words of titles and subtitles and any important words thereafter should be capitalized.
• Titles in the text as well as in notes and bibliographies are treated with quotation marks or italics based on the type of work they name.
  • Book and periodical titles (titles of larger works) should be italicized.
  • Article and chapter titles (titles of shorter works) should be enclosed in double quotation marks.
  • The titles of most poems should be enclosed in double quotation marks, but the titles of very long poems should be italicized.
  • Titles of plays should be italicized.
  • Otherwise, take a minimalist approach to capitalization.
    • For example, use lowercase terms to describe periods, except in the case of proper nouns (e.g., “the colonial period,” vs. “the Victorian era”).
  • A prose quotation of five or more lines should be “blocked.” The block quotation should match the surrounding text, and it takes no quotation marks. To offset the block quote from surrounding text, indent the entire quotation using the word processor’s indentation tool. It is also possible to offset the block quotation by using a different or smaller font than the surrounding text.

Bibliography

• After the end of the main body of your paper, label the first page of your comprehensive list of sources, “Bibliography” (for Notes and Bibliography style) or “References” (for Author-Date style).
• Leave two blank lines between “Bibliography” or “References” and your first entry.
• Leave one blank line between remaining entries.

Some basics:

• List entries in letter-by-letter alphabetical order according to the first word in each entry, be that the author's name or the title of the piece..
• Use “and,” not an ampersand, “&,” for multi-author entries.
  • For two to three authors, write out all names.
  • For four to ten authors, write out all names in the bibliography but only the first author’s name plus “et al.” in notes and parenthetical citations.
  • When a source has no identifiable author, cite it by its title, both on the references page and in shortened form (up to four keywords from that title) in parenthetical citations throughout the text.
  • Write out publishers’ names in full.
  • Do not use access dates unless publication dates are unavailable.
  • If you cannot ascertain the publication date of a printed work, use the abbreviation “n.d.”
  • Provide DOIs instead of URLs whenever possible.
  • If no DOI is available, provide a URL.
  • If you cannot name a specific page number when called for, you have other options: section (sec.), equation (eq.), volume (vol.), or note (n.).