Preparing Your Work for the Creative Nonfiction Web General Appearance, Citing, Bibliographical Form

Preparing Your Work for the Creative Nonfiction Web: General Appearance, Citing, Bibliographical Form

George P. Landow

Unlike the previous documents, which set forth guidelines for creating HTML documents that won't malfunction, this style sheet or rules of our house style is intended to produce a website whose consistency and clear design helps the reader more than the webmaster.

Some General Rules

1. Place titles of all documents between <h2> tags.

2. Place names of authors between <h4> tags. Students should include their names as they wish them to appear, the course for which the documents were created, and the year they took the course. Instructors should include their name, academic title, and link to a brief biography or homepage. Never put "by" before the author's name.

3. Use <h3> tags for subheadings, including those for bibliographies or lists of references.

5. Always include (and maintain) the information about date last modified.

6. Never use all upper-case words, and never capitalize all letters in titles or subheadings.

7. The first time in each web document that you mention or quote authors, use their full names as they appear in their published works. After that, use only their family name.

Converting Foot- and Endnotes

Include a list of works cited at the foot of each individual lexia (document) and then use the MLA short form of in-text citation, which means in practice that you only use as much info in the parenthetical reference as is absolutely necessary. Thus, if you introduce quoted material by "According to Bathurst's The Lighthouse Stevensons," you only need a page number: "quoted text" (34). If, however, you wrote, "According to an historian of Victorian civil engineering, . . . " you'd have to provide the necessary information in full: "quoted text" (Bathurst, 34); if you have two items by Bathurst in your bibliography, you'd have to provide a short title as well: "quoted text" (Bathurst, Lighthouse Stevensons, 34).

Bibliographical Form:

Ruskin, John. Works. 39 vols. Eds. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn. London: Allen and Unwin, 1902-12.

Smith, James. "Tennyson's Heroines." Victoriana 3 (1996): 23-35.

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Last modified 4 December 2006