Style guide for authors of reviews

for the PHS Journal

The following guide is based on the MHRA Style Guide. Where the MHRA Guide and
the following notes disagree, please follow the rules given here.

The MHRA Style Guide can be downloaded free of charge from:

http://www.mhra.org.uk/Publications/Books/StyleGuide/download.shtml

Reviews should be between 500 and 1,000 words (unless you have been asked to supply
a ‘review article’ examining two or more books on related subjects). If you feel the book
deserves a longer notice, please contact the Reviews Editor.

Please begin your review with the details of the book, in the following format:

Author, Title: and subtitle. Place(s) of publication: publisher(s), date. Size in mm (height
first). Pp. 00, 000. ISBN(s). Hardback/paperback (omit hardback if no paperback),
price(s). Illustrations (note whether in colour or monochrome).

Please conclude your review with your name, and a short (two or three sentence) autobio-
graphical note.

General rules for style

Authors should consistently adopt British spelling conventions (except in quotations from
other sources, where the spelling convention of the original should be retained). Please
use -ise spellings, not -ize.

Punctuation should consistently follow British conventions (except in quotations from

other sources, where the punctuation convention of the original should be retained).
British style uses single inverted commas, except for quotations within quotations (which
have double inverted commas). Punctuation should follow closing inverted commas ex-
cept for grammatically complete sentences beginning with a capital. Please do not use the
‘Oxford comma’, except where it is absolutely necessary for clarity (as in ‘I love Miranda
for her beauty, Shakespeare for his wit, and chocolate’ – without the comma here this
sentence would wrongly associate chocolate with Shakespeare).

The use of capitals should be kept to a sensible minimum. Please use lower-case ‘m’ for
‘medieval’ and lower-case ‘w’ in ‘western Europe’. For book and periodical titles only
the first word and any proper nouns should be capitalised (e.g. The history of Tom Jones,
A revised introduction to French grammar, The book collector). This applies to titles in
all languages, except those which normally capitalise nouns (such as German), in which
cases all nouns should be capitalised.
Possessives: omit the final s after the apostrophe if the last syllable of the original word is
pronounced is: thus Bridges’, Moses’, but James’s.

Contractions, abbreviations and acronyms

In British style contractions will have no full points (e.g. Mr, St), though abbreviated
words, which do not end with their final letter, and their plural forms, will (e.g. vol.,
vols., ed., eds.). However, in most cases, it is better to spell out such words in full (there
is little merit in ‘ed.’ compared with ‘edition’).

Acronyms and abbreviations in capitals should have no stops in either British or Ameri-
can style: NATO, USA, EU, BC.

Numbers and dates

Numbers should be written out up to 100, except in a discussion that includes a mixture
of numbers above and below this, in which case all should be in figures (e.g. 356 walkers
overtook 72 others, as 6 fell back, exhausted) and in formulae. Numbers with units
should always be given in figures, with a space between the number and the unit (e.g. 24
mm).

Dates should be written in the form: 20 December 1948; 20 December; AD 245–255.

Centuries should be written out (twenty-first century) and 1920s etc. should be written
without an apostrophe.

In expressing inclusive numbers always give the numbers in full, to avoid any possible
confusion or misdirection through the invisible loss of a numeral, thus:

13–15, 44–47, 100–122, 104–108, 1933–1939, 22,000–28,000

Annotation

Please do not use footnotes or endnotes in your review. If you are writing a ‘review arti-
cle’ footnotes may be used if absolutely necessary, but try to keep them to a minimum.

Layout and pagination

Please double-space the lines throughout. Please do not use Headers and Footers, other
than page numbers. Please ensure that the typescript is paginated throughout, in one se-
quence. The typescript you submit must be the final version. You will not be able to
make any substantial changes or additions once the publication is in production, though
you will have an opportunity to read and correct a proof after copy-editing and typeset-
ting.