Formatting Guidelines and Sample Paper

The Chicago Manual of Style does not prescribe rules of formatting an essay or research paper; the following are generally held standards for title pages, print size, margins, and spacing.

Note: If your instructor has his or her own requirements, follow them. These guidelines are the most commonly required.

Sample Chicago Style Paper

1. Use Times New Roman or a similar font, 12 point in size with standard 1 inch (2.54 cm) margins.  Avoid decorative fonts.
    
2. Double-space throughout the essay, including the bibliography (some course instructors may prefer entries to be single spaced; check with your professor).  Note that footnotes, endnotes and block quotations are single-spaced.
    
3. When beginning a new paragraph, indent five spaces or ½ inch.  Keep the text alignment to the left.
    
4. There are no specific formatting guidelines for a title page, but they are generally required by your professor.  It is important to include particular information on your title page: title, your name, the course code, the professor or teaching assistant, and the date. Normally, the title is centred in the middle of the  age and the author and course information is right justified at the bottom of the title page.  The use of colour or imagery is not recommended.
    
5. Don't underline, italicize, or bold the title, and it is not necessary to put it in quotation marks or in block capitals.
    
6. The rules for capitalization of titles are as follows:
    
   • Capitalize the first word, the last word, a word following a colon, and  all principal words: nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, subordinating conjunctions.
      
   • Don't capitalize the following parts of speech when they fall in the middle of a title: articles, prepositions, coordinating conjunctions, "to" in an infinitive, such as to go, to sleep, to believe. For example of nouns, pronouns, verbs, etc, see here.
                                         
7. Number all pages, except the title page, at the top right corner. You don't need p or pp, or any punctuation following the number. You may include your last name before each page number as a precaution against lost pages: (Bealey 4). Microsoft Word will save you time by numbering every page and will let you create a running head of your name and the page number.
    
8. Don't forget to proofread carefully as well as running a spell check and grammar check. There are many differences among Canadian, American, and British spellings of some words, so choose your  preference (Canadian) and make sure your spell check is set to it. Be consistent throughout your essay. Don't spell the word "centre", as "centre" in one place and as "center" in another.