Submission guidelines

Author Guidelines

The following guidelines for style and formatting will help us to ready your article for publication. If you have any specific questions not addressed by these guidelines, feel free to contact the editor: mbrink@unitychristian.org

Formatting

As much as possible, do not include extra formatting in your document, such as multiple tabs or extra spaces to get things to “line up.” Your document will be imported into a graphic design program so your formatting will all be removed before it goes to design, with few exceptions. Some guidelines:

  • use one space (not two) after periods
  • excerpts can be formatted with extra indent for long quotations
  • bulleted or numbered lists can be included
  • italics and bold can be included
  • average word count: 1500

Scripture

We use NIV unless noted. If you are using a version other than NIV, please note that in parentheses following the citation: (Prov. 29:18, NRSV). Note that the version is in small caps; using all caps is fine; if you are unable to do small caps, we will make the change later.

Scripture books should be abbreviated in parentheses. A complete list of abbreviations can be found in Chicago Manual of Style 15.51.

Style

Adhere to the following style guidelines:

  • use American spelling rather than Canadian
  • lower case the deity pronoun
  • use serial comma (in a list of two or more items, include a comma before “and”)
  • spell out numbers 1-100, round numbers, and start of sentence; otherwise use numerals

Quotations

Note that any material that is not your own needs a proper citation, including author, magazine/book title, place of publication, publisher, year, page number. (See format below.)

The CEJ is now using MLA for citation style. Note that earlier editions of the CEJ followed Chicago style. In-text citations should be in quotation marks followed by author’s name and page number in parentheses:

“Analyses reveal that higher-achieving countries teach fewer topics more deeply each year” (Darling-Hammond and McCloskey 264).