All essays must be in typescript, unless your instructor has granted you permission to the contrary. If you do submit hand-written work, make your writing as clearly legible as possible.
Use good quality laser or ink-jet printer paper, 8.5" x 11". You should leave margins of at least 1" around each side of your typescript. Type on only one side of each sheet of paper.
Your usual text font should be a formal serif font like Times Roman, at a size of about 12pt. Avoid fancy display fonts for body text; they make reading more difficult. Good typesetters avoid mixing many fonts, though you may find that a basic sans-serif font like Helvetica or Arial works well for headings.
Though you can use changes in font style (for example, italics and boldface) to lend emphasis to words, carefully written sentences should seldom require such devices. BLOCK CAPITALS, once a ready tool on the typewriter for drawing attention to titles and headings, should be avoided now that more subtle font manipulations are available.
Use italics for the proper titles of published books, encyclopedias, periodicals, plays, pamphlets, long poems, and works of art. Also italicize foreign words and phrases not yet anglicized through use. Be careful to preserve conventions of capitalization and accent marks in foreign words.
James Joyces's Ulysses The New Grove Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon fin-de-siècle French culture
For conventions in naming works of music, see the guide page on Music Analysis.
Your essay should include a title page, the body of the essay, and the bibliography or reference list. It may also include an appendix or appendices.
The title page should include
| Centered, about 2" from the top margin: | The Title of your Essay Your Name |
| Centered towards the bottom of the page: | The Course Number The Name of your Instructor The Date of Submission |
The title page is not included in your essay's pagination.
The body of your essay must be double-spaced; please do not use 1.5 spacing. Footnotes should be single-spaced.
Your essay's pages should be numbered, preferably in the upper right-hand corner (though you usually do not print the page number on page 1). If you have any material between the title page and beginning proper of your essay, number those pages in lower-case roman numerals (i, ii, and so on) centered at the bottom of the page.
For conventions in citing your essay's sources of information, see the guide page on Citing Sources.
Entries in your bibliography should be single-spaced, with extra space between entries.
The appendix provides a place to put materials that support your essay, but which do not form part of the essay's main body. An appendix may contain tables or charts which are too detailed for inclusion in the text, or a complete charted, scored, or graphed musical analysis. In many cases, students provide a photocopied complete score of the musical work under discussion, as a convenience for the instructor. If you have several bodies of supporting material, you may place them in separate appendices, numbered Appendix I, Appendix II, and so on.
Today's word processing programs are powerful and feature-laden. You would
do well to become acquainted with your program's tools for changing margins;
altering
type justification; cutting, copying, and pasting blocks of text; and adding
bulleted and number lists and tables. Chances are, if you find yourself making
a repeated
series of keystrokes or retyping much material, you are failing to use some
tool that could make your task easier, your results better. Few people, for
instance,
take advantage of their word processor's "styles" feature, with which
you can package groups of formatting commands to make formatting easy and layout
results professional-looking.