We know that guidelines are always a pain, but we need them to ensure uniformity in our posts as well as to keep our site organized. Below, we tried to list as simply as possible a few general and category-specific “rules” for submitting your work.
General
This might be a bit anal, but to ensure that our site remains aesthetically pleasing, we hope that you will be kind enough to style your posts accordingly:
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The title of your post should clearly indicate the category the entry belongs to, followed by a colon and the name of the author and work it explores as well as relevant publication dates. Ex: Prospectus: Martha Meredith Read’s Margaretta (1807) (Also, if the title of your work is too long, feel free to offer a shortened version of it).
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When adding tags, or categorizing your posts, try to look through existing ones before creating something new. The more tags or categories you can place your work into the better, but remember that these labels should reflect the immediate concerns of your research. However, be sure to tag the major authors and names of texts relevant to the specific work you are examining in addition to the major themes it deals with. We thought it would be ridiculous to create categories for each of the authors or texts we will be exploring on Emergentia, but by tagging proper names, members and visitors can use the search bar to conduct their research.
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Directly below the title of entries to the Annotations or Analyses categories, type this: “Peer-Reviewed: 0” After your post is reviewed by other authors or contributors, you will be in charge of modifying your post. It isn’t rocket science, but for more information about the peer-review process, check out our this page.
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To add color to our site, try to include a picture of the text you are exploring, whether it be the cover of a book or an image from a movie.
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Each paragraph should be enclosed with the following tags to justify the text: <p style=”text-align:justify;”> TEXT </p>
Abstracts
In keeping with academic convention, abstracts should be restricted to about 200-300 words although no one will be strictly enforcing this rule. We just think it would be helpful to practice summarizing your thesis or research into a brief, coherent paragraph, which will definitely prepare you for future academic conferences and/or publishing your work. Sample
Annotations
Many professors will tell you that annotations should be around 3-5 sentences and maybe some of you are experts at doing this, but we have no strict guidelines about length on Emergentia. Since you are writing for a wider audience who may or may not be familiar with your discipline, try to be as clear and thorough as possible so your research can help others interested in the same topic(s). Also, if the annotation you are submitting is directly related to a project or paper you are working on, briefly mention this at the beginning of your post to orient the reader.
Be forewarned: We will are not going to accept annotations for full-length critical theory books. Instead, we are hoping that our authors and contributors will write annotations based on specific introductions or chapters from these theoretical texts to make the material more manageable to summarize. Working on a smaller scale will hopefully allow this dense information to become more digestible to our readers. Sample
Analyses
This is probably the most diffuse section of our blog since we are hoping that it can apply across a number of disciplines. So we decided that for texts we are examining, whether it be poetry, novels, film, etc., our authors or contributors should submit a post on five major themes the work deals with. These do not have to be the most prominent within the story or movie you are exploring, but can be the ideas you find interesting or those immediately related to your research. Eventually we hope that other authors or visitors familiar with these works will contribute comments about specific themes or ideas overlooked in these initial posts. So do not be concerned about making your selection of topics comprehensive in regards to the work you are analyzing.
A few nit-picky things:
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Since many of the people visiting this site may not be familiar with the text you are discussing, it would be helpful to begin your entry with a very short (five sentences max.) summary of the text, highlighting the major characters and details of the plot. Please do not stress about missing a plot detail or two… This part of the post is mainly to give our readers a context before you begin elaborating on the major themes of the novel or film. Also, if the text you are discussing has characters feel free to list a maximum of five names and discuss their significance and role in the work. Do not worry if your novel or movie has more than five principal characters- we hope that in the future other members of Emergentia can supplement these initial analyses posts with insights of their own.
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For each theme you cite, be sure to bold the phrase or idea followed by a colon and then your analysis, ex: Time: TEXT TEXT TEXT or Death: TEXT TEXT TEXT and if applicable include page numbers with passages relevant to these topics in parentheses, ex: (5, 29, 57…)- But offer only a maximum of 10 page numbers for each theme to prevent information overload.
Emergent Discourses
These posts are meant to be fun and interesting insights or questions, so they will be largely unstructured. There are no guidelines or restrictions for length. The only formal requirement (as with the other elements of the blog) is to begin the title of your post with “Emergent Discourse:” You can follow the colon with any phrase or question you would like- the more outrageous and eye-catching the better. ^^
Prospectuses
Hopefully our authors and contributors will already know what a prospectus entails, but basically it is a proposal for a research project or paper that highlights the major questions or concerns you will be addressing. It does not need to have a “thesis” per se, yet the more specific and narrow you can be, the better others can respond to your work. Consequently, we will not set any limitations on the number of pages or words you have to submit, but keep in mind that anything less than a page is probably too vague and anything over ten is most likely going overboard. We also think it would be a good idea to include a list of works consulted to let your readers know what kind of critical works you have been looking at. This may also help us suggest other relevant sources. Sample
Sharon Tran 