Style Guidelines

In order to submit your work for consideration in The Wellsian: The Journal of the H. G. Wells Society, please follow these style guidelines.

Font

For reading by peer reviewers, please double-space all submissions in Times New Roman 12, 10 for footnotes.

Paragraphing

Indent every paragraph, except the first. Leave the spacing between paragraphs at 0.
Use one space only after each sentence.

Referencing

Give bibliographical information in footnotes.
Use the ‘insert footnote’ command for references. Footnotes should be placed at the end of a sentence, following the full stop, without a space.
In formatting your footnotes, please use the most recent MLA guide.
Here are a few examples:

Books

1 H. G. Wells, Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress Upon Human Life and Thought. 1901. Introduction by Martin Gardner, Mineola: Dover, 1999 (47).

2 John S. Partington, Building Cosmopolis: The Political Thought of H. G. Wells. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003 (25).

3 H. G. Wells, Experiment in Autobiography: Discoveries and Conclusions of a Very Ordinary Brain (since 1866). Vol. 1. London: Victor Gollancz and The Cresset Press, 1934 (II, 221).

Note: the City of Publication should only be used if the book was published before 1900, if the publisher has offices in more than one country, or if the publisher is unknown in North America.

Articles in Journals

4 G. K. Chesterton, Review of The Salvaging of Civilization, by H. G. Wells, The Illustrated London News, 4 June 1921: 738.

5 I. F. Clarke, ‘Before and After The Battle of Dorking’. Science Fiction Studies vol. 24, no. 1, 1997, p. 34.

6 On Wells’s short stories, see Genie Babb, ‘H. G. Wells in the Borderlands: “The Plattner Story” and “The Crystal Egg” as Experiments in Psychic Research’, The Wellsian: The Journal of the H. G. Wells Society 35, 2012, pp. 37-50.

Books Chapters

7 Patrick Parrinder, ‘Introduction’, in H. G. Wells, The Discovery of the Future [1902] with ‘The Common-Sense of World Peace’ [1929] and ‘The Human Adventure’ [1913], edited and introduced by Patrick Parrinder, London: PNL Press, 1989, 8.

Internet Resources

8 Sarah Cassidy, ‘Churchill “Borrowed” Famous Lines from Books by H. G. Wells’, The Independent, 27 November 2006, www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/ churchill-borrowed-famous-lines-from-books-by-hg-wells-6229767.html, accessed on 15 April 2020.

You should refer to an oft-quoted item parenthetically within the text, if the full bibliographical details are given following the first reference. Subsequent references to secondary material may be given by the author’s name and/or their shortened book title, as in:

9 Parrinder, 10.

10 Wells, Anticipations, 123.

Bibliography

Follow the most recent MLA guide for bibliography.

Present a bibliography at the end of your work.

Quotation Marks and Italics

Use single quotation marks throughout, double for quotations within quotations.
Keep the italics for a title within a title, e.g. H. G. Wells in Nature: A Reception Reader.

Full Stop

Place the full stop outside the quotation.

Language Usage

Follow British over American usages where these differ. Use ‘-ise’ and ‘-isa’ in words like ‘realise’ and ‘realisation’.
Use Wells’s, not Wells’.
Use gender-neutral expression where possible.

Text Editions

Please use Penguin or Atlantic editions of Wells’s primary texts. When a book has been published in two places by one publisher, just give the first.