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How to Write an Essay in Chicago Style

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Essay in Chicago Style

Typically, you will be assigned to write an essay formatted in Chicago style, if you are studying History, Arts, or English. Since the Chicago Style is mostly intended to be used in printed books and periodicals rather than academic assignments, the guidelines below are supplemented with recommendations from Kate L. Turabian’s Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations (8th ed.).

If, however, even after reading this guide, you will be uncertain about any requirements for the formatting, you can always turn to essay writing service and ask them to format your paper correctly.

Reasons to Use Chicago Style

Using a single formatting style makes it easier for the audience to comprehend a text due to a familiar structure that the reader can follow. If you do not want to learn all the details, just buy essay from a reliable custom writing company that will do all the job for you.

By applying the Chicago/Turabian style’s standards, you get a chance to:

  • Provide the audience with cues that can be used for following your flow of thoughts more effectively
  • Let the audience concentrate more on your ideas
  • Set your reliability or ethos in the area by showing an awareness of your readers and their needs

General Requirements

  • The text has to be double-spaced, except for extracts, notes, bibliography entries, table titles, figure captions
  • For extracts, use the following formatting:
    • Any prose quotation that includes over five lines, or over 100 words, has to be blocked
    • Over two lines of poetry have to be blocked
    • An extract has to start a new line
    • An extract must not be enclosed in quotation marks
    • An extract has to be indented with the word processor’s indention tool
  • Page numbers should be placed in the header with Arabic numerals and start from the first page
  • For longer projects, use subheadings. You can create your own format that must be consistent throughout the paper
  • The margins must be set at 1
  • The font should be readable, like Times New Roman, size not less than 10 pt., preferable 12 pt.

Title Page

The academic assignments should either have a title page or just present the title on the first page of the document.

Use these instructions for the title page:

  • Center the title a third way of the way down the page
  • Several lines later, include your full name, class information, and the date of submission
  • For subtitles, end the title line with a colon and add the subtitle under the title.
  • All the lines of the page must be double-spaced.

Main Body

  • Capitalize every title of the work that you refer to in the project Headline Style (first words of titles and subtitles must be capitalized)
  • Treat titles with quotation marks or italics:
    • Italicize book and periodical titles
    • Use double quotation marks for article and chapter titles
    • Usedouble quotation marks for the poem titles, but italicize the titles of very long poems
    • Italicize the titles of plays
    • Otherwise, a minimalist approach to capitalization

Headings

While you will not find any prescribed system for formatting headings and subheads in The Chicago Manual of Style, there are some recommendations in it:

  • Be consistent in structuring headings and subheadings
  • Use Headline Style to capitalize headings
  • Start subheadings on a new line
  • Distinguish subheadings by another font size
  • Make all the levels of hierarchy comprehensive and sequential
  • Differentiate levels of subheadings by type style, use of italics and boldface
  • Do not use more than three levels of hierarchy
  • Do not end subheadings with periods

A Note on Citations

There are two methods for making references in Turabian Style: the Author-Date System and the Notes-Bibliography System.

The Author-Date system involves usage of parenthetical citations in the text to reference the last name of the author of the source and the year of publication. All the citations match particular entries on a References page that concludes the document. Such a method is very similar to the APA style.

Notes-Bibliography system implies the usage of numbered footnotes in the text that direct the audience to a shortened citation at the bottom of the page. Every citation matches a longer one on a Bibliography page at the end of the paper.

When crafting your Chicago/Turabian style academic paper, always ensure that you are using your school’s preferred citation method.

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