Style Guide

Liberal Currents adheres to the Chicago Manual of Style. 

Below are a few things to watch out for before you submit your piece for review. 

citations: Provide citations for all of your factual claims. Where possible, link to your source. Where formal citations are necessary, use  in text citations with a bibliography rather than footnotes or endnotes. The format for in text citations is (Author Date, Page). Bibliography formatting example:

Coase, Ronald H., and Ning Wang. How China Became Capitalist. Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

blockquotes: To be used sparingly and as short as possible. Shorter, in text quotes are preferred. The lion’s share of your writing should be your own words.

punctuation: One space after periods, commas, and all other punctuation. Periods and commas go inside quotation marks; semicolons and colons go outside e.g. It was called “The Liberal Manifesto.” and It was called “The Liberal Manifesto”; many have cited it as their main source.

em dash or en dash: Em dash with no spaces on either side, e.g., We—although diverse—love all liberals.

centuries: written as “19th century”—no superscript  

Oxford comma: Absolutely

Ellipses … have spaces on either side

numbers: Spell out numbers up to and including one hundred e.g. ten, ninety-nine, 104, 256. Write the word “percent” rather than use the percentage sign.

capitalization (generally): Words like liberal or conservative are not capitalized but references to specific movements or parties do require capitalization, e.g., the Progressive Party; the Republicans but not republicanism. This can get a bit tricky, so if you are unsure, feel free to make a note for our editors.

capitalization (in article titles): The only words that should be lowercase in a title are a, an, the, and, or, prepositions of three letters or less, and the first word after a colon regardless of what the word is. All verbs, even the little ones, are capitalized. This Is an Example of How You Are to Write a Correctly Capitalized Title: An Important Example to Follow.

capitalization (in article section titles): new sections are to be in Heading 3 font and only the first word is capitalized (unless there’s a proper noun).

publications, and journals: italicized e.g. The Liberal Manifesto; Liberal Currents, except in titles where they aren’t italicized or in quotation marks, e.g., The New York Times Sucks Now

book titles, TV show titles, etc.: italicized in text, but in quotation marks in article titles, e.g., “Adolescence” and the Right’s War on Men

article titles: quotation marks e.g. “The One True Liberal”

Paragraphing: One hard return to end a paragraph. Do not add an extra hard return between paragraphs.