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Style Sheet

Dialogue uses a combination of the Chicago Manual of Style supplemented by the LDS Style Guide and by our own when both fail. For example, Chicago is cavalier in the extreme where newspaper citations are concerned, but we take them as a serious source of information. Below are some models for common citations. In case of perplexity, please supply the greatest possible amount of information. All examples are fictitious.

Citation Examples

  1. BOOK: Edwina Lee Johnson, Secrets of Godey’s Ladies Book: An Analysis of Medical and Health Advertisements (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 2006), 16-26.Non-exclusive permission to re publish the Work in print or in a commemorative collection or in a special commemorative issue of the Journal.
  2. EDITED ANTHOLOGY: Theodore Caffitch Charlesworth, “Pinkham’s Pills and Undiagnosed Opium Addiction in Baltimore, 1840-60,” in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Magazines and Middle-Class Aspirations, edited by Edwina Lee Johnson (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 2009), 117-18.
  3. JOURNAL ARTICLE: Ted Charlesworth and Edwina L. Johnson, “‘The Luxury of Ill Health: A Career for Middle-Class Women,” Feminist Studies 32, no. 4 (Spring 2010): 100-101.
  4. CURRENT NEWSPAPER/MAGAZINE: Patricia Finch, Associated Press, “AMA Study on Prescription Drug Abuse,” Salt Lake Tribune, June 11, 2009, B4.
  5. James H. Albion, “Prescription Drugs in the Home,” Ensign, March 2010, 19-20.
  6. HISTORIC NEWSPAPER/MAGAZINE: John Harrison Taylor, Letter to the Editor, St. Louis, April 8, 1856, The Seer 3 (May 18, 1853): 151.
  7. INTERNET SOURCE: P. Henderson and K. Cooks, “Mormons Besieged by the Modern Age,” New York Times, Jan. 31, 2012, http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/01/31/us-mormonchurch-idUSTRE80T1CM20120131. [Include the full URL, not just the webpage address.]

Punctuation

Quotation marks always go outside periods and commas, inside colons and semi-colons, and either outside or inside question marks and exclamation marks depending on the sense of the quotation.

Use commas in a series. EXAMPLE: Tom, Dick, and Harry were Boy Scouts.

Here’s how to punctuate a compound (more than one independent clause) sentence: EXAMPLE: Tom, Dick, and Harry were Boy Scouts, and Jane, Lisa, and Maria were Campfire Girls.

WRONG: Tom, Dick, and Harry were Boy Scouts, but never got their Eagles. (The comma is incorrect because it separates the two parts of the compound verb: “were … got.” It contains only one independent clause with a compound verb.)

Here’s how to punctuate a complex (main clause + at least one dependent clause) sentence. EXAMPLE: When the Campfire Girls took over the Scouting program in light of its faltering finances, boys showed new enthusiasm.

Here’s how to punctuate a compound-complex (main clause + at least one dependent clause) sentence. EXAMPLE: When the Campfire Girls took over the Scouting program, boys showed new enthusiasm; and the BSA finances, which had been faltering for a generation, stabilized and began climbing upward.