NOTES FOR CONTRIBUTORS TO THE HISPANIC JOURNAL

Notes for Contributors to the Hispanic Journal
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The guidelines enumerated by these notes should be implemented, and any and all corrections should be made, before the final version of your work is returned to us. In other words, the final version of your work should include everything that you intend it to without exceeding the 5,500 word limit, which includes the text of your submission, accompanying notes, your Works Cited page, and your secondary bibliography, if you have included one. Do NOT wait until the Galley Proofs of your article have been prepared and sent to you to make corrections because, by the time the galleys have been formatted, only minor corrections can be implemented within them. If, when you return your Galley Proofs to us, we consider the corrections that you have made to be excessive, publication of your work will necessarily be delayed. It will then be your responsibility to determine when you would like to resubmit your article for consideration for publication in a future issue of the journal.

The latest version of the MLA guide to documentation should be consulted to implement these guidelines because each new version of the MLA manual includes changes to previous material that must be considered.

When you submit the final version of your work, YOU MUST FOLLOW THESE INSTRUCTIONS EXACTLY AS STATED! As you complete each of these steps, place a check mark on the line beside the step’s number indicating that it has been done. Then, when you return your final submission to us, you MUST include this document in the package as well.

  1. You can submit your work on a CD or on a diskette. The disk should be formatted for MS-DOS or Microsoft Windows for personal computers. We cannot accept articles written on a Macintosh platform.
  2. Please, submit your work in Microsoft Word (for Windows 98 or more recent).
  3. Use single spacing throughout the article. (This is different from the MLA recommendations. Please do not use the recommended double spacing because the articles are published in single spacing.) Use a 5-space tab to begin a paragraph, and continue to single-space between paragraphs. However, leave an extra space before and after any indented quotations, sections, titles or subtitles, or divisions between sections.
  4. Make sure that you DO NOT have extra spaces in between words. Please look at every single sentence to make sure that you have the whole article correctly formatted.
  5. DO NOT PLACE ANY MARGIN OR TAB SETTINGS! Use normal margins; do not format the text so that each of the lines appears to be the same length (i.e. do not justify the text, as is done in this document).
  6. DO NOT USE UNDERLINE! Use italics where you would normally underline. (This differs from what the MLA advises.)
  7. DO NOT USE BOLD TYPE! Use italics if emphasis is needed.
  8. For indented sections, use the Left-Right Tab (shift F4 in WP5.1)
  9. For WORKS CITED, use the hanging indent function (F4 shift tab in WP5.1)
  10. If you use notes, USE ENDNOTES, and use them sparingly. The endnotes that we accept cannot exceed more than 40 lines of typed text total. Do not put extra spaces between the note number and the beginning of the note. In the text, superscript the number referring to your endnotes immediately after the period ending the pertinent sentence: ex.: … last word. 4
  11. The title for the endnotes sections should be “Notes” if the article is in English. If the article is in Spanish or Portuguese, the proper endnotes title is “Notas.” Use the ENDNOTES functions in Microsoft Word for Windows. Put the endnote–placing command following the title NOTES/NOTAS at the end of the article and before the WORKS CITED.
  12. Omit any extraneous codes (page numbering, suppress page number, headers and footers, justification, hyphenation, pitch, font, etc).
  13. The whole article MUST conform to the guidelines set forth by the most recent MLA style manual ( TEXT, WORKS CITED, AND BIBLIOGRAPHY ALL MUST FOLLOW THE MLA STYLE).
  14. IMPORTANT: Include only the sources you cited in your article in the Works Cited . If you would like to list secondary sources (optionally), include a bibliography.
  15. You MUST follow the MLA guidelines regarding quotations.
  16. For titles in Spanish, capitalize only the first word of the title (and, of course, all proper nouns within it). For titles in English, capitalize all important words in the title in accordance with MLA
  17. You MUST follow the MLA for matters of punctuation and documentation. A few frequently overlooked points deserving of special attention are mentioned in numbers 18–20.
  18. For indented sections, punctuation is at the end of the line, followed by the page citation in parenthesis. (14)
  19. Depending on the type of text you are citing, it has to go as follows : For non-indented quotes, the correct order is either punctuation, quotes, endnote number: …end. ” ¹ OR quotes, parenthesis, page citation, parenthesis, punctuation: …end”(14).
  20. When using quotation marks, always place the punctuation marks (including periods, commas, colons, semicolons, etcetera) inside of the closing quotation mark: . . . end of text?”
  21. Submit both hard-copy and electronic versions of any and all tables, charts, graphs, etc.
  22. You MUST send two copies of your submission. The first of these should be in hardcopy. The second of these should be on a CD or diskette. Please ensure prior to sending us these materials that all corrections have been recorded in both. Failure to do this may result in a delay of the work’s publication.

* It is in the best interest of the authors that Hispanic Journal be published as free of errors as possible and on time. Therefore, it will be the responsibility of the authors to follow the latest version of the MLA research style guide and the “Notes for Contributors” as requested in the acceptance letters received by the authors. Any final version of a submission (defined as the hard copy, accompanied by the diskette/CD, submitted after the letter of acceptance) that does not follow the MLA style and the “Notes for Contributors” in its totality will be returned to the author and will need to be resubmitted to be considered for a later issue. The Hispanic Journal reserves the right to not publish an accepted article after resubmission. There are no exceptions to these rules. The Hispanic Journal is a non-profit publication which does not have the personnel to correct the articles’ styles.