Style guide of the Platypus Review

INTRODUCTION

The style guide is for the preparation of texts for publication.

This style guide assumes the Chicago Manual of Style as its base.

Recommended word processors:

• Google Docs (free but requires sign up)
• LibreOffice Writer (open-source and free)
• Microsoft Word (not free)

Recommended file types when exporting and sending: .docx or .odt.

The presentation of texts on the website requires slightly different rules, such as paragraph breaks with newlines and the use of h1 and h3 headers, but the guide can still be useful for web editors.

CAPITALIZATION

Capitalization of Left, Right, and derivatives

We capitalize Left, Right, and their derivative forms.

Examples:

• socialist Left
• Leftist politicians
• Right-wing tendency

Capitalization of titles

We capitalize the titles of our articles as if they were sentences. Note that we capitalize the first word after a colon or question mark that ends the main title.

Examples:

• How long is the end of history?
• The pandemic and the Left
• Look where we are: An interview with Steve Roberts

Non-capitalization of race colors

We do not capitalize black, red, white nor any other color used as an adjective for racial groups of people (e.g., anti-black racism, white electorate) unless it is part of a proper noun (e.g., the Black Hundreds, the Black Panthers).

Words after colons

The first word that immediately follows a colon does not need to be capitalized. Only in the title of a piece do we capitalize the word following a colon.

CHARACTERS

Diacritics

We use diacritics.

Examples:

• café
• façade
• Jürgen
• Kołakowski
• Lukács
• naïveté
• raison d’être
• résumé
• Solidarność
• Žižek

Money

For small amounts of money, it might make sense to write the numbers and currency with words, even slang currency names, especially when it is used in a more casual manner:

• five dollars
• two euros
• six pounds
• three bucks
• two quid

For an emphasis on accuracy with small numbers, it may make more sense to use numbers and the currency symbol:

• A gallon of gasoline went from $3.25 to $5.50.

For millions, billions, etc., we add the currency’s symbol before the number, followed by the multiplier. Note that we use numerals instead of words for these numbers.

• $5 billion
• $4.5 million
• €3 million

Percentages

We use the character % rather than writing percent or per-cent.

While we usual write out numbers with a single digit, we do use a number in the case of percentage numbers with only one digit, e.g., 5%.

Superscripting

We superscript the suffixes of ordinal numbers when the numbers are longer than one digit, e.g., 21st century.

CITATIONS

Submissions should use footnotes. We convert these to endnotes in our production process.

The superscripted number to indicate a footnote or endnote should generally come at the end of the sentence’s punctuation (including quotation marks). However, the number can be more specifically placed if appropriate. We do not italicize this foot/endnote indicator, even if it is among italicized text.

If the text is readily available online, i.e., free to access and easy to find, we include its URL, wrapped in angle brackets: <URL_HERE>.

Citation examples

Article in a journal or review

• Chris Mansour, “Back to Enlightenment values: An interview with Brendan O’Neill,” Platypus Review 103 (February 2018), <https://platypus1917.org/2018/02/03/back-enlightenment-values-interview-brendan-oneill/>.
• E. P. Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,” Past & Present 50 (1971): 76, 78, 126.
• Scott R. Nelson, “Who Put Their Capitalism in My Slavery?,” Journal of the Civil War Era 5, no. 2 (2015): 289–310.

Article from a news organization

• Amber Jameison, “Trump to Bernie Sanders supporters: ‘We welcome you with open arms,’” The Guardian (June 7, 2016), <https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jun/07/donald-trump-bernie-sanders-supporters-clinton-nomination>.
• “Bricks thrown, sponge bullets fired in Wellington unrest,” Otago Daily Times (March 2, 2022), <https://www.odt.co.nz/star-news/star-national/bricks-thrown-sponge-bullets-fired-wellington-unrest>.
• Michael Erman and Manas Mishra, “Pfizer expects 2021, 2022 COVID-19 vaccine sales to total at least $65 bln,” Reuters (November 2, 2021), <https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/pfizer-raises-covid-19-vaccine-sales-forecast-36-billion-2021-11-02/>.

Book

• Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1973).
• Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. Edwin Cannan (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1976).

Edited book

Note that we put the editor(s) after the title of the book.

• The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, eds. Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt (New York: Urizen Books, 1978).
• The New Left Reader, ed. Carl Oglesby (New York: Grove Press, 1969).
• The Idea of Communism, eds. Costas Douzinas and Slavoj Žižek (New York: Verso, 2010).

Chapter of a book

• William H. Sewell Jr., “Toward a Post-Materialist Rhetoric for Labor History,” in Rethinking Labor History: Essays on Discourse and Class Analysis, ed. Lenard R. Berlanstein (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 15–17.

Film

Note that we put the director after the title.

• One Battle After Another, dir. Paul Thomas Anderson (Sherman Oaks: Ghoulardi Film Company, 2025).

PhD dissertation

• Mateo Mohammad Farzaneh, “Shi’ite Clerical Authority and Modern Politics: Muhammad Kazim Khurasani of Najaf and His Support of the Iranian Constitutional Revolution of 1906–1911” (PhD diss., University of California, Santa Barbara, 2010).

Platypus event

• Kathrin D. and Andreas Wintersperger, “Über David Harveys Condition of Postmodernity” (January 12, 2025), <https://youtu.be/6XoHcDnrvdQ>.

Social-media post, e.g., on X:

• Aizenberg (@Aizenberg55), “Gaza Fatality Update Jan 2026 . . .,” X (January 26, 2026), <https://x.com/Aizenberg55/status/2015814807337775342>.
  • We write the user’s display name (Aizenberg), followed by the actual user tag in parentheses ((@Aizenberg55)). We include the first few words of the X post, followed by an ellipsis, to specify the post, as users often make multiple posts a day, and the date alone may not be enough to identify it. This is followed by the name of the social-media platform in italics, followed by the date and then the URL.

Shortened versions

After the first citation, all further citations of the item can be shortened.

If a footnote cites the same page as the previous footnote, we use Ibid.. If it is the same source, but a different page, we add the page: Ibid., 93.

Examples:

• Mansour, “Back to Enlightenment.”
• Thompson, “Moral Economy,” 126.
• Ibid., 78.
• Jameison, “Trump to Bernie Sanders.”

URLs

We wrap URLs in angle brackets (technically they are the less-than and greater-than symbols: <>): <https://youtu.be/Jm03YkksjN4>.

Analytics information in URLs

Sites like YouTube often affix data to the end of the URL they display in the browser or by using their share feature, which they do for analytics purposes. We can omit these added suffixes to clean up the string while keeping the functionality of the URL.

For example, the URL to the video of our panel “The American Revolution and the Left” originally looked like the following:

https://youtube.com/Jm03YkksjN4?si=JBWRvMBw63Qh_Arp

While this will work, everything after the question mark can be cut to reduce the URL to the essential information:

https://youtube.com/Jm03YkksjN4

Note that we can reduce it further by using YouTube’s youtu.be domain:

https://youtu.be/Jm03YkksjN4

We recommend confirming that the URL works correctly after shortening it.

FORMATTING DIFFERENT SUBMISSIONS

Articles

We capitalize and bold the first few words of an article.

We use indentation to mark new paragraphs rather than using newlines. The creation of newlines happens when we move the text to our website.

Articles and book reviews must have their edits approved by the author before publication.

We tend to not include author biographies for the sake of brevity and to emphasize the ideas of the particular article.

Book reviews

We preface book reviews with a citation of the book. See the section on citations for an example.

In the text, any citation of the work being reviewed should be done as page numbers in parentheses, followed by the punctuation:

• Rothstein was not recalled to Moscow, as Kendall claims, “to give first-hand information on the British scene and the formation of the CPGB in particular” (381).

However, any other works should be cited as footnotes, following our usual conventions.

Interviews and panels

Preface

We add an italicized preface to briefly introduce the interview or panel. It begins with the date that the event happened. If there is video of the event, we include the URL to the video in a footnote that is indicated at the end of the preface.

Appearance of names

We use a person’s full name, in the first time they speak. After that, we use their initials. In all instances, we bold the name or initials and the colon immediately after.

Formatting the interviewer’s questions

The interviewer is given this same treatment; we do not italicize the questions in the way that we do in the Q&A section of panels.

Panels

We italicize questions in the Q&A section of panels, and each question gets a new paragraph. We do not break one question up into multiple paragraphs, but rather keep it as one paragraph, even if it’s long. This visually indicates that the question is all from the same person.

Wordcount limits

• Articles and book reviews: 5k words or less
• Interviews: 7k words or less
• Panels: 13k words or less

Interviews and panels can be compressed by cutting out filler words (see the section on reductions).

HEADERS

Headers such as Opening remarks, Responses, and Q&A use the same font size and spacing as the body text. They are bolded, and merely sit on the line above their given text.

When moving texts to the website, we make these h3 headers, in addition to being bold.

NON-ENGLISH WORDS

If non-English words are commonly used in English such as status quo, ad hominem, or Gesundheit, they do not need to be italicized. When they are less common, like Selbstaufhebung or ad calendas graecas, the non-English words should be italicized. If the non-English words make up a proper noun, they do not need to be italicized (e.g., Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands).

It may be helpful to include a footnote for uncommon non-English words. When doing so, we prepend the definition with square brackets containing the language, and we capitalize the first word after it.

Examples:

• [Ancient Greek] The right time, the proper time, the exact time, the critical time, etc.
• [French] Over there, down there, i.e., not here.

NUMBERS

We write words for numbers with one digit: one, two, . . . nine.

We use numerals for numbers with more than one digit: 10, 11, etc.

The same applies to ordinal numbers:

• first
• second
• ninth
• 10th
• 11th

For large numbers like 5,000,000,000, we write 5 billion. Of course there can be times when writing out the full number is more appropriate.

For speaking more loosely of large numbers by their multiplier, we can write it as a word:

• Several thousand soldiers
• Millions of voters
• Hundreds of combinations

We use periods to mark decimal points.

ORDER OF CONTRIBUTOR NAMES

We write the order of panelists alphebetically by last name. We do the same when there are multiple authors of an article or multiple interviewers in an interview.

The same applies for a list of translators, transcribers, etc.

PUNCTUATION

Dashes and hyphens

Hyphen (-)

A hyphen is often used for compound words. Note that when a compound word is made up of commonly associated words, an adverb, or a name, it does not need to be hyphenated.

Examples of hyphens in compound words: - in the mid-19th century - 19th-century politics

Examples of compound words that don’t use a hyphen:

• Civil War history
• poorly written essay

En dash (–)

We use an en dash for ranges of numbers, dates, and the connotation of the space between two entities. This mostly appears for the sake of ranges of numbers, dates, etc., but also geographic or political ranges. We see this in the names of wars or conflicts, like Israel–Palestine.

We do not put spaces around an en dash unless it separates things made of multiple words.

Number ranges for integers with multiple digits

We use two digits for the second number if the digits preceding those two digits are identical to those in the first number. When those “prefix” digits differ between the two numbers, we write the full length of the second number. Even when the two numbers might share all but a single digit, we use two digits (if there are at least two digits) to display the second number.

Examples of ranges of and potential shortenings of numbers:

• 125 through 126 → 125–26
• 125 through 130 → 125–30
• 125 through 245 → 125–245
  • We write the full length of the second number.
• 1848 through 1895 → 1848–95
• 1776 through 1848 → 1776–1848
  • Even though both numbers share the first digit 1, we write the full length of the second number.

Other ranges:

• Monday–Friday
• December 2022 – January 2023
  • Note that we add spaces here around the en dash.

Em dash (—)

Em dashes are used to denote an aside or break. Note that we put a space around both sides of an em dash. Placing em dashes is often a matter of judgment, as there are times when a similar effect can be achieved with a comma, colon, or semi-colon.

Examples:

• The Iranian state has subsisted on an increasingly narrow basis since then, with periodic protests — and their repression — growing in scale and intensity, up to those of earlier this year.

Ellipses

When using an ellipsis to show the omission of text from a quotation, we use three periods with a space around each. If we wish to convey that the sentence ends after the omitted text, we add a fourth period.

An ellipsis in the middle of a quoted sentence:

• Brzeziński’s “rigid hatred of the Soviet Union . . . stood to the right of many Republicans, including Mr. Kissinger and President Richard M. Nixon.”

Example of ellipsis that ends the sentence of quoted material within a block quote:

• Firstly, in the sense that our attention is still taken up by our needs, and secondly, because we regard as nominalistically insoluble something that we are as yet unable to produce with the methods of science. . . .

Oxford comma

We use the Oxford comma because it functions as “syntactic sugar” to convey meaning that could be otherwise obscured by the oddities of writing: item-a, item-b, and item-c.

One could also say that the word and is syntactic sugar in a list of items separated by commas: item-a, item-b, item-c. With or without this and, we retain a comma before the final item in a list.

Quotation marks and apostrophes

Quotation marks should be double inverted commas (“ ”) for quoting something. If there is a quote within the quoted material, it is wrapped in single inverted commas (‘ ’). In addition, be sure to use curly quotation marks rather than straight quotation marks marks (" " or ' ').

We use a curly apostrophe (’) rather than a straight one (').

Punctuation with the end of a quotation

This has to do with the placement of our author’s punctuation marks in and around quoted text.

We put our author’s period or comma before the closing quotation marks:

• .”
• ,”

When a quotation contains a quotation that is also ending, we put the period or comma before the inner closing quotation mark:

• .’”
• ,’”

We put colons and semi-colons after closing quotation marks:

• ”:
• ”;

We put exclamation and question marks after closing quotation marks:

• ”!
• ”?

Block quotes

The font size of block quotes should be 1 size smaller than the body’s font size. If the text is at 12pt, the blockquote should be 11pt. The block quote should be indented from the left and right in its entirety. The block quote is double-spaced just like the body of text.

Singular possessive for words ending with s or an s-sound

For the singular possessive, we add an apostrophe + s, even to words that end in an s or sound like they do.

• Engels’s book
• Marx’s book

Line spacing

The body of text should be double-spaced, including block quotes.

Footnotes should be single-spaced.

REDUCTIONS

The raw transcripts of interviews and panels, especially the Responses and Q&A sections of panels, often have substantial amounts of extra words that come about in conversation.

Transcribers and editors can compress these texts by reducing excess verbiage.

Common occurances of excess words that can be cut:

• Emphatic adverbs like very or highly: these don’t necessarily add clarity to an idea. For example, saying that a politician is corrupt is not made clearer by saying very corrupt.
• I think: when speakers are speaking, they are almost always expressing their own thoughts. When a sentence begins with I think, we can omit that and update the sentence (like deleting a corresponding that) to simplify the statement.
• Phrases to begin a sentence to continue an idea, such as And so, So, etc.
• Adding then as the second half of an if statement. It can be assumed that then is implied when using if.

Of course these are a matter of judgment by the editor.

SPACES

We use a single space between sentences.

We leave no extra spaces after a paragraph.

To better see the placement of spaces in a document, turn on the option to view non-printing characters.

• In Google Docs: View → Show non-printing characters
• In LibreOffice Writer: View → Formatting Marks

SPELLING

We use American English spelling conventions.

Examples of converting to American conventions:

• labour → labor
• organise → organize
• realise → realize
• sceptic → skeptic

Note that when non-American English spelling conventions are used in a proper noun or are within a quotation, we retain the original spelling:

• The British and Irish Communist Organisation

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

If my submission is accepted, how long will it take to appear in the Platypus Review?

• This is up to the judgment of the PR staff. Because the PR is published in (nearly) monthly issues, at the minimum, it will be six to eight weeks to allow for editing. This is not a guarantee of being published within that time range.

What if I can’t find what I’m looking for in this style guide?

• Refer to the Chicago Manual of Style.