Style Guide

Singapore University Press

Style Sheet

For submission of a final version of a manuscript for copy-editing and production, the material needs to be brought in line with our house style. In general the Press uses British spelling, and follows the conventions of the University of Chicago's Manual of Style (15th edition, 2003). We allow some variation in presentation, as indicated below. The essential point is that the style used must be consistent throughout a manuscript.

The following guidelines show general features required for all the final version of all manuscripts, and also allowable variations in footnotes and other aspects of a work.

General Features

• Double spacing throughout (including long quotes and footnotes);
• Pages numbered in the upper right hand corner and consecutively throughout the manuscript;
• Top and bottom margins one inch, left margin 1.2 inches and right margin a full two inches;
• Indented first lines of paragraphs;
• No extra spacing between paragraphs;
• No right justification (the right margin should be ragged);
• Hyphenation turned off;
• Printed with 11-point type, preferably using a Times Roman font;
• Printed without any bold headings or decorative features;
• Printed on one side of the paper only;

Every heading should be indicated with a letter and number placed inside angular brackets to indicate the level of the heading <h1> for main headings, <h2> for first level sub-headings, <h3> for sub-sub-headings. In most cases no more than three levels of headings should be used.

The manuscript should at this stage be complete, including all of the following (if relevant):

• Title;
• sub-title;
• author's or authors' name(s) in the form that should be used in the book;
• dedication;
• table of contents;
• foreward; ? preface;
• acknowledgements;
• introduction;
• glossary;
• list of abbreviations;
• list of maps;
• list of tables;
• list of figures and illustrations;
• appendices;
• bibliography;
• biographical data for the author(s)

With very few exceptions, we require indexes for our books; authors must either prepare indexes, or if you prefer you may ask us to hire an indexer, with payment to be treated as an advance against future royalties.

If your manuscript has special features that might make it desirable to depart from these conventions, please discuss the matter with the Press before making your submission.

The manuscript should be submitted both as hard copy (one printout) and electronically (either a diskette, a CD, a ZIP disk, or attachments to an e-mail message). Please do not use data compression software. If you have used a word processing program other than Microsoft Word, the files should be sent in Rich Text Format. Disks or CDs should be clearly labelled with your surname and a short version of the book title on each disk, as well as the date when the disk was submitted. Please ensure that you have a copy of the manuscript that is identical to the version you have submitted.

Numbers

Numbers from one to ten should be spelled out. Numbers larger than 10 should be presented as numerals.

Page Numbers

In footnotes and bibliographies, inclusive page numbers should be elided: 112-7 (not 112-117 or 112-17)

Percentages

Use "per cent" (not "percent"); the symbol "%" should only be used in tables or figures.

Dates

In footnotes and bibliographies, use the following abbreviations for the months of the year: Jan., Feb., Mar., Apr., Aug., Sept., Oct., Nov., Dec. Other months should be spelled out in full.

Dates should be indicated in the form "Day Month Year" without punctuation, as in: 14 September 1945 (in the main text) or 14 Sept. 1945 (in a footnote).

Inclusive years should be written as 1945-52 (not 1945-1952).

Abbreviations

Abbreviations that include the final letter of the full form of the word (such as Dr, Mr, Mrs) should not have a full stop (period) after them. Other abbreviations (such as Lieut.) are followed by a full stop.

Names in the Text and Name Order

For the first occurrence of a name in a text, give the name in full ("as John Wong notes in his book").

In endnotes, use the natural order of an author's name (for example, John Wong, Yeo Tiong Min-in which Wong and Yeo are the respective surnames). In bibliographies, surnames should come first. Southeast Asian names present special difficulties, and authors are encouraged to consult with an editor about how to handle such names when preparing a manuscript or bibliography.

Notes

Information footnotes should be kept to a minimum. As a rule of thumb, if a piece of information is important enough to be in the book, it belongs in the main body of the text. Notes indicating sources of information, or referencing additional discussion of given points, will be set either at the end of individual chapters or at the end of the book, as appropriate.

NUS Publishing can accept manuscripts that use either endnotes or the author-date referencing system. For works in the humanities we prefer the former. For works in the sciences or social sciences, either form can be used, depending on the kinds of source materials used.

Endnotes

For manuscripts prepared by a single author, notes should appear at the end of the manuscript, with numbering for each chapter starting with 1. For edited collections, notes should appear at the end of each chapter. Several examples are given here, and corresponding bibliographic entries are shown below. The essential point is that a citation must allow a reader to locate a source, or a particular point within a source. Information that is superfluous (such as the issue number for a journal that numbers pages consecutively throughout the year) should be omitted.

Examples

1 Brenda S. A. Yeoh, Contesting Space in Colonial Singapore: Power Relations and the Urban Built Environment (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 2003).

1 Kevin Y. L. Tan, ed., The Singapore Legal System (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 1999).

1 Yeo Tiong Min, "Jurisdiction of the Singapore Courts", in The Singapore Legal System, ed. Kevin Y. L. Tan (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 1999), pp. 249-96.

1 Laina Ho, "Pronunciation Problems of PRC Students", in Teaching English to Students from China, ed. Lee Gek Ling, et al. (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 2003). [Note: "ed." is an abbreviation for "edited by", and should not be written as "eds" even though there is more than one editor.]

1 John Wong and Sarah Chan, "China's Outward Direct Investment: Expanding Worldwide", China: An International Journal, 1 (2003): 273-301. [Note: if a journal or other source is used repeatedly, an abbreviated form an be indicated after the first reference; for example, (henceforth, CIJ)].

Short Forms

For the first occurrence of a source, full publication details must be provided. For subsequent occurrences, use the author's surname(s) and a short form of the title, selecting something that will clearly identify the source, and makes sense in its own right. For the article by John Wong and Sarah Chan, for example, the following is acceptable (but "China's Outward" as a short title would not):

1 Wong and Chan, "China's Outward Direct Investment", pp. 282-3.

Author-Date Referencing

Author-Date references appear in brackets within the text, and show the author's surname, the year of publication of the source, and the page number(s) concerned. This style is best suited to manuscripts that draw heavily on published works, but does not work well when there is extensive use of primary or archival sources. Refer to The Chicago Manual of Style for further details.

Bibliographies

The format of a bibliography will be slightly different depending on whether a book uses Endnotes or the Author-Date system of referencing. In the latter, the date appears immediately after the name of the author, rather than at the end of the publication details.

Examples

Bibliography in a book that uses Endnotes

Yeoh, Brenda S.A. Contesting Space in Colonial Singapore: Power Relations and the Urban Built Environment. Singapore: Singapore University Press, 2003. (Orig. Publ. Oxford University Press, 1996).

Tan, Kevin Y. L., ed. The Singapore Legal System. Singapore: Singapore University Press, 1999. 1st ed., 1989.

Lee Gek Ling, et al., eds. Teaching English to Students from China. Singapore: Singapore University Press, 2003. [Note: et al. is used only when there are more than three authors or editors, and is set in italics.]

Yeo Tiong Min, "Jurisdiction of the Singapore Courts", in The Singapore Legal System, ed. Kevin Y. L. Tan. Singapore: Singapore University Press, 1999, pp. 249-96.

Wong, John and Sarah Chan, "China's Outward Direct Investment: Expanding Worldwide", China: An International Journal 1, 2 (2003): 273-301.

Bibliography in an edited book

The argument for a single bibliography is that the articles will now be part of a larger work, and do not stand alone. If they have sufficient coherence to justify being published in book form, where they act in the same way as chapters in a single-authored book, a single bibliography will serve for all, and has the benefit of allowing a reader interested in the literature on a given subject to survey it all at once. (A collection of articles in a journal is different, because journal collections do not require nearly as much coherence.) Moreover, by placing the titles in a single bibliography, it is easier to ensure that they all follow a common format. Finally, separate bibliographies can add several pages to the book compared to a single unified bibliography, and may increase costs if that means adding an extra signature to the book (a signature being a set of 8 or 16 pages).