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Putting it on Paper

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Henry M. Silver
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Extract

The following article, written at the suggestion of the editor of PMLA∗ confines itself almost wholly to the mechanics of manuscript preparation and to the handling of proofs. It is addressed to those scholars who, from time to time, submit their writings to learned journals. It has been read by, and corrected by, editors both of other journals and of university presses.

Scholarly editors seem not infrequently to be harassed by the very people who should be their pride and joy, the apples of their editorial eyes—their contributors. And this is strange, because, much as the editor needs his contributors, the more do the contributors need him.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 65 , Issue 3 , April 1950 , pp. 9 - 20
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1950

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Footnotes

∗

Mr. Silver is Adviser on Scholarly Publications to the American Council of Learned Societies.—ED.

References

1 Mary Alexander, Chicago Univ. Press; William Bridgewater, Columbia Univ. Press, and editor, The Columbia Encyclopedia; Helen Clapesattle, Univ. of Minnesota Press; Glan-ville Downey, editor-in-chief, American Journal of Archaeology; Guy Stanton Ford, managing editor, The American Historical Review; August Frugé, Univ. of California Press; Donald Goodchild, American Council of Learned Societies; Melville J. Herskovits, editor, American Anthropologist; Charles C. D. Miller, editor, publications of the Mediœval Academy of America; Sawyer McA. Mosser, editor, publications of the American Numismatics Society; Da tus C. Smith, Princeton Univ. Press; Mary E. Stith, Univ. of Oklahoma Press; Fred Wieck, Univ. of Chicago Press; Roberta Yerkes, Yale Univ. Press.

2 PMLA, for example, has about an article a day submitted to it, and prints only about seventy per year.

3 “Please put in a strong plea for plenty of space at the beginning of the MS, around the title. Many people putfhe title on the first available line at the top of the first page, then begin the text at once… I would recommend devoting the upper third of the initial page to the title and whatever has to go with it. When I took over … I found some articles (mostly by foreigners) which had no correspondence attached to them and no indication of the author's address; in many cases I had never even heard of the author. I did track them all down, but it was a weary business for me and risky for the author”—GD.

4 “I applaud your seeming expectation that authors can be persuaded to study the Manual of Style or Words into Type and thereafter do their own styling. But I do not share that expectation. I should be content … if you merely succeeded in convincing authors that there are accepted rules of one kind or another in these style matters, so they would not object and think the editor high-handed or pigheaded when he does for them the styling they have been indifferent to”—HC.

5 “The use of notes vanes with the nature of manuscripts. In certain cases, lengthy explanations are necessary, but if they interrupt the logic and flow of the argument, they should not be allowed to lie like salt wastes in the text, but should be put into the notes. True, the author should think three times before feeling sure that what Professor X thinks on a point should be summarized. Usually second thought ends with reduction to a citation. If, after third thought the author still thinks the summary should be in, then the footnotes should include it. . . .” —WB.

6 “I don't like to see you give even this much approval to the continued use of op. cit. and loc. cit. I have yet to find an author who had a clear and correct idea (or my idea, at least!) of the difference between these two. It seldom takes any more lines to use instead the author's last name and a shortened form of the title, and this saves author and editor endless hunting and checking to make sure the first reference is there, that there aren't two books by the same author, etc., etc. If the footnotes are for the information and convenience of the reader, why make him hunt back through lines and lines of fine print to find out what the op. cit. or the loc. cit. is? I'd rejoice to see your article take perhaps the first and a long overdue step toward the elimination of these abbreviations from scholarly apparatus”—HC.

These words are put in as a note because, though the writer agrees wholeheartedly with what is said, the abbreviations referred to are nevertheless required by many editors.

7 “I want you to say something about the author's making sure that the references in his footnotes are correct before submitting his manuscript. We seem lately to have had a rash of authors who somehow or another discover on galleys … that they have the wrong book and/or the wrong page number for references in footnotes. How and why they make these discoveries will always remain a mystery to me, for they would have to check back against original sources or notes to do so in most cases—something that certainly should have been done before the manuscript was submitted for publication”—MES.

8 It is becoming more and more the custom for scholarly editors to style and correct and query a manuscript, then to return it to the author for comment before proceeding further. When this is done—and may the practice spread!—the author is very justly charged for all changes made in the proof which are not corrections of printer's errors.

9 “Your advice on changes that mean re-setting a paragraph is not explicit enough for the authors with whom I have had to deal. You have to hit them with a hammer to persuade them that taking out or putting in a five-letter word in the first line of a paragraph is not an innocent diversion”—WB.

“We find that inexperienced authors, and sometimes experienced ones … nonchalantly insert a word or a phrase in the first or second line of a paragraph and are surprised to learn that this may involve resetting the entire paragraph”—HC.

“Place more emphasis on the costs of alterations. We publish twenty-three learned journals. On some of them, alterations consume sixteen cents for every dollar spent on composition. This is completely superfluous, and if you could make some remarks from your point of vantage about such costs, we would at last have something authoritative to quote to our Journal editors”—FW. Note here the biter bitten. Editors, forsooth !

It is almost impossible to emphasize sufficiently the waste, waste, waste suffered by scholarship each year from author's alterations. Many a book would now be published instead of gathering dust in manuscript if only half of what is spent each year on avoidable alterations could have been saved and applied.