The Association for Gravestone Studies

Notes for Contributors to Markers
Markers Style Guide

Scope

he Association for Gravestone Studies was incorporated as a non-profit corporation in 1978 as an outgrowth of the Dublin Seminar for New England Folk life. The first volume of Markers, the Association's scholarly journal, appeared in 1980 and has been published annually since 1988.

The subject matter of Markers is defined as the analytical study of gravemarkers, monuments, tombs, and cemeteries of all types and encompassing all historical periods and geographical regions. Markers is of interest to scholars in anthropology, historical archaeology, art and architectural history, ethnic studies, material culture studies, American studies, folklore and popular culture studies, linguistics, literature, local and regional history, cultural geography, sociology, and related fields. Articles submitted for publication in Markers should be scholarly, analytical, and interpretive, not merely descriptive or entertaining, and should be written in a style appropriate to both a wide academic audience and an audience of interested non-academics.

Please note that articles on death and dying in general or on other aspects of death-related material culture would not normally fall within the journal's scope unless clearly linked to the study of gravemarkers and cemeteries. Particular cemeteries may form the basis of study if there is a focus on the markers, monuments, tombs and other aspects of material culture found within, and if the purpose of the article is more than simply a non-analytical history or description of the cemetery. Memorials (even if located outside cemeteries) also may be appropriate topics if analyzed in the context of memorial styles and traditions both inside and outside cemeteries. If in doubt, please consult with the editor prior to submitting an article. For illustration of these general principles, prospective authors are encouraged to consult recent issues of Markers. For a list of contents of all issues of Markers, see the journal’s webpage, http://www.gravestonestudies.org/markers.htm.

Submissions
Authors are encouraged to send a query letter (email preferred) outlining a project before sending a manuscript. Queries and submissions to Markers should be sent to:

June Hadden Hobbs
Editor, MARKERS
Gardner-Webb University
Box 1345
Boiling Springs, NC 28017-1345
email: jhobbs@gardner-webb.edu fax: 704-406-3921

Please submit an original and three copies of the ms. (including three sets of photocopied illustrations) via regular mail. Mss. and photocopies will not be returned. If you send photographs that you wish to have returned, please include a SASE. Submissions should include originals of any accompanying photographs or other illustrations (see below for specifics). Most articles in Markers run between 2500 and 6000 words (i.e., ten to twenty-five 8 1/2 x 11 double-spaced pages, including double-spaced endnotes and any appended material). NOTE: Longer articles may be considered if they are of exceptional merit and if space permits. Please consult with the editor prior to preparing such an article for submission.

Should the article be accepted for publication, a final version of the text, a 150-word abstract, and a biographical statement (2-3 sentences) should be submitted to the editor in both hard copy and as an electronic submission (via CD, diskette, or e-mail attachment). Consult with the editor if you have any questions.

Within a short time after the article is accepted, authors must also submit, in electronic form, a list of addresses of local or regional libraries, historical societies, museums, and other institutions that might be interested in purchasing the issue of Markers in which the author’s article appears.

Regular volumes of Markers are scheduled to appear annually in June or shortly thereafter. No deadline is established for the initial submission of a manuscript, but the articles scheduled for publication in a given volume of the journal are generally determined by the chronological order of their acceptance and submission in final form.

Style/Notes/Appendices

In matters of style, manuscripts should conform to the rules and principles enumerated in the most current edition of The Chicago Manual of Style. A Markers style sheet will be available soon.

Notes, whether documentary or discursive, should appear as endnotes (i.e., at the conclusion of the article); documentary notes should conform in format to the models found in the chapter entitled "Note Forms" of The Chicago Manual of Style. In manuscript, notes should be typed double-spaced and appear following the text of the article and before any appended material. Separate bibliographies are not desired, though bibliographical material may be included within one or more notes. Any acknowledgments should be made in a separate paragraph at the beginning of the note section.

Appendices should be placed following the endnotes and clearly labeled and titled (e.g., Appendix I: [name], Appendix II: [name], etc.) Create them as separate files.

Again, the prospective author is encouraged to consult recent issues of Markers for examples of these principles in context.

Illustrations

Markers is a richly illustrated journal. The journal encourages prospective authors to submit up to twenty photographs plus appropriate pieces of line art. Illustrations should be carefully chosen so that each illustration materially enhances the article's value through visual presentation of points under discussion in the text and does not merely provide a duplicate illustration of a point. Photos should be 5 x 7 or 8 x 10 black and white glossy prints of medium-high contrast, and should be of the highest quality possible. Although black and white is the preferred format, exceptionally high quality color glossy prints may be submitted. High-quality digital photos are also acceptable. Maps, charts, diagrams, and other line art should be rendered as carefully as possible so as to enhance presentation. A separate sheet should be provided listing captions for each illustration. It is especially important that each illustration be numbered and clearly identified by parenthetical reference at the appropriate place in the text, e.g. (Fig. 7).

Review Process

Submissions to Markers that meet the parameters set forth above are sent by the editor to members of the journal's editorial advisory board for review and evaluation. Every effort is made to conduct this process as quickly as possible. When comments have been received from all reviewers, the author will be notified of the publication decision. If an article is accepted, suggestions for revision may be made and a deadline for submission of a finalized manuscript established. All accepted articles will be carefully edited for style and format before publication.

Copyright

Authors are responsible for understanding the laws governing copyright and fair use and, where appropriate, securing written permissions for use of copyrighted material. Generally, if previously copyrighted material of more than 250 words is used in an article, written permission from the person holding the copyright must be secured and submitted to the editor. Permission must be obtained from persons who have supplied photographs to the author, and credit to the photographer or library should be provided in captions or an acknowledgment statement.

Copyright is normally given to the Association for Gravestone Studies, though requests for permission to reprint are readily accommodated. Offset copies of published articles are not provided to authors; each contributor, however, receives a complimentary copy of the volume.

STYLE and FORMATTING GUIDE for MARKERS Articles

PART I: MANUSCRIPT FORMAT
PART II: GUIDE TO PUNCTUATION, USAGE, AND MECHANICS
PART III: ENDNOTE FORM (Chicago Manual of Style)
PART IV: ILLUSTRATIONS, CAPTIONS, AND TEXT REFERENCES

PART I: MANUSCRIPT FORMAT

1. Double-space throughout, including endnotes and indented long quotations.

2. Set all text for "left justify" except title/author and any headings or other items you specifically want to be centered. Do NOT set for an even right margin.

3. Use ENDNOTES, NOT FOOTNOTES.

4. Use superscript numbers (no periods) for endnote numbers in endnotes if your software allows. Otherwise just use the default form automatically supplied by your word-processing program . Note numbers in text should appear at the end of sentences (except when this placement would create confusion). If several items in a sentence need to be referenced, consolidate references, in order, into a single endnote.

5. Provide a list of captions and any appendices as separate files.

PART II: GUIDE TO PUNCTUATION, USAGE, AND MECHANICS

Follow the guidelines below for punctuation and style. For general questions regarding punctuation, grammar, and stylistics, please consult a recent edition of the Chicago Manual of Style.

1. Active voice: Use active voice instead of passive voice whenever possible:

Simon Brewster carved many floral motifs on his gravestones.
NOT
Many floral motifs were carved by Simon Brewster to decorate his gravestones.

2. First Person: Use first person instead of third-person references to yourself as the writer:

I was immediately struck by the use of vividly rendered skulls. OR The vividly rendered skulls are quite striking.
NOT
One is immediately struck by the use of vividly rendered skulls.

3. Apostrophes: Form the possessive of most singular and plural nouns by adding 's (EXCEPTION: for singular and plural words already ending in s that do not add an additional s sound, add only an apostrophe):

the carver's letters
Harriette Forbes's book
BUT
Highland Hills' director
the twins' gravestone

Form the plural of letters, numbers, and numerals by adding s. Do not use an apostrophe to form the plural. (Exception: to prevent confusion, use an apostrophe with lower case letters.):

The carver's Gs and 3s are distinctive. His work during the 1880s was by far his best. BUT his x's and y's

(Note that house style calls for using italics also to denote letters and numbers under discussion, as when analyzing a carver's lettering style.)

4. Capitalization: (See additional details in the Chicago Manual of Style.):

a) capitalize names of buildings, cemeteries, and monuments, etc., (Hurlbert Monument, Mount Auburn Cemetery)

b) most historical or cultural period names are lowercased except for proper nouns and adjectives (Baroque period, classical period, colonial period, romantic period; but Hellenistic period, Victorian era) or to avoid ambiguity (Bronze Age, Enlightenment, Middle Ages, Reformation, Renaissance).

c) In titles of works in English, capitalize the first and last words and every other word except for prepositions, articles, and coordinating conjunctions unless the writer did otherwise or the style manual requires otherwise. See the Chicago Manual for a more complete listing of capitalization rules for titles. For foreign languages, generally follow the publisher's usage.

d) United States/U.S.--Spell out when used as a noun; abbreviate when used as an adjective.

After their move, they spent a lot of time adjusting to the United States.
The graves of U.S. servicemen killed in Europe . . .

5. Commas: Use a comma before the "and" that introduces the last word/phrase in a series:

The icon, the epitaph, and the border
NOT
The icon, the epitaph and the border

Use a comma before and after the state when giving locations by city and state

The rural cemetery in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, contains many examples.

6. Dashes: Use two hyphens to make one dash. Do not use spaces before or after a dash (Many word-processing programs will automatically convert two hyphens into an em-dash.):

The carver--unaware that an apprentice was giving his plans to a rival--was astonished to find his design in Alabama.
NOT
The carver - unaware that an apprentice was giving his plans to a rival - was astonished to find his design in Alabama.

7. Dates:
Use no apostrophe when referring to the years in a decade:

The 1830s
NOT
The 1830's

Use "CE" (Common Era) and "BCE" (Before the Common Era) instead of "AD" and "BC" except when quoting another author who uses the earlier style. "CE" precedes the date, but "BCE" follows it:

CE 1046
NOT
AD1046

Write dates American style, not European style (note comma before and after year):

February 13, 1948, was . . .
NOT
13 February 1948 was . . .

8. Ellipsis Periods: Use three spaced periods to indicate an omission within a quote. Use four spaced periods if the omission includes the end of a sentence. Do NOT use ellipsis periods at the beginning or end of a quotation.

"In the four quarters of the globe, who . . . looks at an American picture or statue?" wrote the Reverend Sydney Smith in 1820 in the Edinburgh Review.

Just four years earlier a newspaper writer invited outsiders to an Independence Day celebration in Kenton with these words: "Kenton comes nearer representing the old west than any other town we know of . . . The Old West is fast disappearing."

9. Hyphens: Hyphenate compound words used as a single adjective before a noun:

nineteenth-century rural cemeteries
Mount Auburn's far-reaching influence

(Exception: do not hyphenate compounds formed with an adverb ending in -ly plus an adjective or participle, or the names of ethnic groups when used either as nouns or adjectives.)

Compounds with well-, ill-, better-, best-, high-, little-, lesser-, low-, etc., are hyphenated when they precede the noun unless the expression carries a modifier: well-known man; he is well known; high-quality work; very high quality work. When they follow the noun they modify, they are not hyphenated: He was well known.

10. Italics: Use italics instead of underlining for titles of separately published works, foreign words, and words/letters/numbers referred to as words/letters/numbers.

Cemeteries and Gravemarkers: Voices of American Culture
NOT
Cemeteries and Grave markers: Voices of American Culture

11. Numbers:

In general, spell out words for numbers from one to ninety-nine and all numbers that begin a sentence. Use numerals for numbers 100 and above:

evidence of eight carvers' works
fifty graves marked by fieldstones
120 burials

Exceptions: a) round numbers (hundreds of graves, thousands of burials, etc.) are usually spelled out; and b) when many numbers are used within a paragraph, rendering all as numerals will usually make reading easier, especially if the reader will be thinking of totals, comparisons, etc., as in a sentence such as " More than 300 of the gravestones are decorated with various devices, including 172 cherubs, 44 death's heads, and 9 hourglasses; 81 gravestones have 2 or more images." (Note: Most readers glaze over quickly after a sentence or two like this. It is generally preferable to subordinate numerals in such sentences by putting the numbers of images in parentheses AFTER the word-hourglasses (9), death's heads (44)-and to put a lot of numerical information in the form of charts or graphs Also, the second clause could be rendered as a separate sentence reading, "More than a quarter of the gravestones have two or more images.")

Note: Avoid numerals to open sentences (spell out number or reword to get the number out of first position).
Hyphenate two-word numbers from twenty-one to ninety-nine:

Three hundred and twenty-one slate stones lay broken in the graveyard.

12. Punctuation with Quotation Marks: Commas and periods always go inside closing quotation marks; colons and semicolons always go outside; question marks and exclamation points may go inside or outside depending on whether the question or exclamation mark refers to the quoted material alone or to the entire sentence in which the quote is embedded.

PART III: ENDNOTE FORM (Chicago Manual of Style)

FIRST REFERENCE: Book
Book: Single author, 1st edition:
¹ Philippe Ariès, Western Attitudes Toward Death: From the Middle Ages to the Present, trans. Patricia M. Ranum (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974): 85-107.

Book: Single author, 2nd or later edition:
⁵⁵ Lorado Taft, The History of American Sculpture, 2nd ed. (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1924), 104.

Book: 2 or 3 authors
⁶ Cynthia Mills and Pamela H. Simpson, Monuments to the Lost Cause: Women, Art, and the Landscapes of Southern Memory. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2003), 123-124.

Book: More than 3 authors (give only 1st author's name followed by a comma and "et al."-see "Book: editor or translator" entry below.)

Book of anonymous/unknown authorship:
¹The Picturesque Pocket Companion and Visitor's Guide, through Mount Auburn (Boston: Otis, Broaders and Company: Boston, 1839), 75.

Book: editor or translator
¹The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. William H. Gilman, et al., 16 vols. (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1960-1982), 4:335.

Chapter in an edited collection:
11Blanche Linden-Ward, "Strange but Genteel Pleasure Grounds: Tourist and Leisure Uses of Nineteenth-Century Rural Cemeteries," in Cemeteries & Gravemarkers: Voices of American Culture, ed. Richard E. Meyer (Logan, Utah: Utah State University Press, 1992), 300.

FIRST REFERENCE: Dissertation or thesis
¹Jan M. Seidler, "A Critical Reappraisal of the Career of William Wetmore Story (1819-1895), American Sculptor and Man of Letters" (Ph.D. diss., Boston University, 1985), 21-33.

FIRST REFERENCES: Journal Article
Single author:
¹Frederic A. Sharf, "The Garden Cemetery and American Sculpture: Mount Auburn," The Art Quarterly 24 (Spring 1961): 80-88.

¹¹Laurel K. Gabel, "Ritual, Regalia and Remembrance: Fraternal Symbolism and Gravestones," Markers XI (1994): 1, 25.

Two or three authors:
⁶ Shannon Nichol, Karen May, and Erik Lees, "Are 'Ecocemeteries' a Viable Option? Pros and Cons," Landscape Architecture 92:12 (Dec. 2002): 9-12.

More than three authors:
⁷ Christoph Frank, et al., "Diderot, Guiard and Houdon: Projects for a Funerary Monument at Gotha I," The Burlington Magazine 144:1189 (May 2002): 213-22.

FIRST REFERENCE: Newspaper Article

⁷ Leslie Perrin Wilson, "H. W. S. Cleveland Provided Vision for Concord's Sleepy Hollow," The Concord Journal, 21 November 2002, 14.

FIRST REFERENCE: Website (webpage name, website title, full address followed by a period)

⁷ "Don," Find-A-Grave, http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=5488&pt=%20Don.

SHORTENED FORMS FOR SUBSEQUENT REFERENCES (pick a key phrase or group of words-not necessarily the first words--from the title):

BOOK:
¹Kasson, Marble Queens, 114-115.

ARTICLE or DISSERTATION:
¹³ Gabel, "Fraternal Symbolism," 13.

¹Seidler, "William Wetmore Story," 21-33.

PART IV: ILLUSTRATIONS--CAPTIONS AND RELATED TEXT REFERENCES

1. Use "Fig." (figure) to refer to all illustrations (including maps, photos, and charts) and number consecutively.

2. In your text, all references to illustrations should use "Fig." followed by the figure number, all in parentheses, generally at the end of a sentence but before final punctuation mark. Adding "See" before "Fig. X" is usually redundant. See additional examples of concise form in issues of Markers):

The Amos Binney Monument by Thomas Crawford proved to be one of America's most important funerary works (Fig. 8).

3. Captions should be brief and need not be sentences. For gravemarkers and monuments, they should include the name of the buried person, the death date if known/readable, and location of the marker. Use a period after the figure number. (Note: It is usually redundant to include the word "gravemarker" or " gravestone.")

Fig. 3. Judah Monis, 1764, Northborough, Massachusetts. Carved by William Park.

4. Captions should NOT introduce new ideas but can echo a point made in the text (note too, that in this example, to add "Maryland" after "Frederick County" would be redundant as all the gravemarkers in this article are found in Maryland):

Fig. 4. Crudely executed lettering on John Walker gravestone (1830), Fairmount Cemetery, Libertytown, Frederick County, which appears to reveal Hammond's inexperience.

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