Turabian with Footnote

Note the value of a properly formatted essay. Just when you say you are finally done writing your essay, you suddenly realize that you are clearly far from over because your essay doesn’t look like one at all. There will always be the need for instructions on what your paper should look like, apart from you’re your essay should contain. Writing an essay about law or history is a very time consuming process and formatting it might take even longer without the right guide. The Turabian format is ideal for law or history essays because its overall goal is a professional looking output without the use of parenthetical citations for less hindrance to reading.

Title pages should contain the following:

1. The name of the school at about the 7^th or 8^th line in uppercase letters, centered with regular font

2. The title of your essay in upper case letters just 4 to 6 spaces below the name of your school. Each side should not go over 1.5 inches, so make use of the line after this one if necessary.

3. The description of your essay in uppercase letters, like “AN ESSAY SUBMITTED TO (YOUR CLASS SUBJECT)”, which can take two to three lines of the page

4. “By (Your Name)” centered and either in uppercase or regular writing.

5. The month and year you are submitting your paper; this is only applicable when you’re writing an essay in higher educational levels.

Up – 2 inches

Left – 1 ½ inches

Right – 1 inch

Down – ¾ inch

Font styles and sizes

The general font used in the Turabian/Chicago format is Times New Roman 12 and double spaced, but this is not a fixed rule and can still be changed depending on final instructions. This standard goes for most parts of the essay with the exception of note numbers within the body that are in superscript, as well as footnotes and endnotes, which only use single spaces and a font size of 10. The font type used in one part of the essay should also be used in the rest of the paper for uniformity; once you stick to Times New Roman, do not add Arial or Georgia into the mix.

Body of the Essay

Page numbers are normally found in the bottom center of each page, without going over the ¾ inch margin. The reasoning for this positioning is because the Turabian format is styled like books and putting the page numbers on extreme left or right sides can render the numbers invisible because of the book binding. As for the content itself, all paragraphs should be indented in 0.3 inches, which makes it very different from other formats that use half an inch like the APA and MLA format.

Quotation Marks or direct quotations?

Cited passages that could not be altered are written as copy-pasted quotations in the body of the essay itself. If you do not paraphrase a quotation you should make it distinguishable from the rest of your paper so you won’t get accused of stealing someone else’s work. You can make this distinction either by adding quotation marks to the sentence taken and incorporating it into the paragraph or you could dedicate a whole paragraph to the quote. The latter is more suitable for works with more than 40 to 45 characters and should only be used sparingly, or else your paper will look like someone else’s work in majority. Any unnecessary lines can be removed from the quotation itself; all that you need to do is to indicate where you removed some lines in the form of ellipsis (…) so you won’t need to paraphrase anything in the quote itself.

Footnotes or endnotes?

Footnotes and endnotes serve as in-text citations and also areas where you could put in your own comments about the essay. Normally if your work is supposed to be objective, you won’t be allowed to become too personal in your essay. But the Turabian Format still allows avenues for free expression in the form of those notes. You could choose one or the other but you can’t have them together in one paper to avoid being redundant. Footnotes are generally harder to prepare because you will need to painstakingly write notes at the bottom of every page that needs it, but it guarantees that your readers conveniently see your notes immediately. Endnotes are more convenient on your end because all you have to do is write every note at the near end of the essay right before the bibliography. The downside to this is that your readers will have to jump from one page from another just to see them. The bottom line is the choice will depend on what you can do within the given time.

The Basic Citation Guide

The bibliography page in the Turabian format is found at a separate page after the endnotes. It should contain all the works that you looked up so that other readers can refer to all of them when they need to research for themselves. The bibliography list should make use of hanging indents and should be arranged in alphabetical order. The sequencing of the source information is as follows and also stays true to the font styles and punctuation marks:

First name and last name. Title of the Source. State/City of Publication: Publishing house, year of publication

Essays on law and history, with so many words, can be dragging to read if not formatted properly. Formatting your essay will really take time, but it’s time well spent to get you a good grade. Take note of that when you write your essays and you’ll be able to submit a paper that’s not only fun to write but also fun to read.