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information for Contributors to Metro and Screen Education

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PLEASE READ THE FOLLOWING CAREFULLY BEFORE SUBMITTING YOUR WORK:

Articles can be emailed as an attachment to editor@atom.org.au (Microsoft Word). Feature articles should not exceed 4,000 words. Reviews should be approximately 2,000 words. Interviews should not exceed 2,000 words. Conference papers will be considered for publication as is, but will not be refereed unless they have been re-written to meet the appropriate academic criteria, following the Metro magazine style guide.
Please keep all formatting to a minimum, the only formatting required is:

• sub-headings to be in bold;
• film and book titles in italics;
• quotations over thirty words in italics;
• single space only between sentences; text double-spaced and left justified;
• use endnotes, rather than footnotes, and all references should follow Metro’s style guide, as below.

Please note: Rather than embed images within word documents, remember to send the image files separately as JPEGs or TIFFs.

Writers are expected to thoroughly check their work for spelling, grammatical and typographical errors before submission; articles with an inordinate number of errors, or that do not conform to our style guide, will be asked to re-submit.

Please include a brief, one-sentence writer’s by-line to run at the end of the article, and full contact details for our database. With feature articles, if possible, please include a writer’s photograph (this may be emailed as a JPEG, or mailed as a hard copy. Images will be returned upon request.

STYLE AND REFERENCING GUIDELINES
The following points offer a basic style guideline, as of 2007. All articles submitted to Metro magazine or Screen Education magazine for consideration must follow these guidelines:

• film titles to be printed in italics, with name of director and year of production in brackets after first appearance of title e.g. Eight Men Out (John Sayles, 1988)
  
• actor’s name to be given in brackets after first mention of character name – e.g. Henry Hill (Ray Liotta) in Goodfellas (Martin Scorsese, 1990)
• articles to be referenced with endnotes; endnote markers to be superscripted Arabic numerals, following all punctuation
  • e.g. ‘The look of a film comes out of the story.’.¹
• referencing details as follows: author (including where possible first name, not just initial), ‘title of article’, title of book/journal, publishing house, city of publication, year of publication, page numbers (if relevant); for subsequent references, use ibid./op. cit.
  
  • e.g. Ien Ang, Watching Dallas, Methuen, New York, 1985.
    
  • e.g. Amy Taubin, ‘Playing it Straight’, Sight and Sound, August, 1996, pp.6-8.
    
  • e.g. Andrew Ross, ‘The Ecology of Images’ in M. Torgovnick (ed.), Eloquent Obsessions, Duke University Press, Durham and London, 1994.
• quotes to be designated by single quotation marks:
  •  e.g. Yannick Dahan claims in Positif, ‘DarkCity is an irritating filmic object …’
• quotes within quotes to be designated by double quotation marks:
  • e.g. In her article on the mysteries of film marketing, Lyla Wilson notes ‘There are no hard and fast rules; as William Goldman famously declared “nobody knows anything”’.
• If a quote is embedded within a sentence, the full stop follows the quotation marks (see above).
• quotations of more than thirty words to be in their own paragraph, italicized and without quotation marks (see below). Please indicate whether any emphases are yours or original. Use square brackets when adding your own text within a quotation.
• Ellipses are to be used to mark the omission of words within quotations, e.g.
  • In a man’s interior world, perhaps there are secrets locked away; each one of us contains the best and the worst, by our material condition … Only the shining intoxication of fresh love can sometimes dissipate this dark threat: but let the new woman in a man’s life be discreet; the hidden places of the masculine self are forbidden to her and, above all, those where … past love lies.
    (note that only three points are used, with a space either side, even if the ellipses comes at the end of a sentence, in general, ellipses don’t figure at the beginning of stand alone [over thirty words] quotations).
• Web sites should be cited in full and followed by the date accessed. Details of articles published on the web should be referenced in the standard form, as above.
  e.g. Kathy Pollit, ‘Kristof to the rescue’, The Nation http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040301&s=pollitt 
  Accessed 18 March 2004.
• dates to be given as follows: 10 September 2001 (day-month-year, no punctuation)
• eighteenth century (not 18th century, C18)
• 1960s (not 1960’s, sixties, ’60s)
• First World War, Second World War, World War Two (not WW2, World War 2, etc.)
• numbers from one to ninety-nine are to be written out in full. Numerals for 100 onwards. The exceptions to this are 95-year-old, 2am (otherwise time is written out in full e.g. seven o’clock, ten to six)

COMMON WORDS AND PHRASES:

• filmmaker/filmmaking
• documentary-maker, video-maker to be hyphenated; other hyphenated words: pay-TV, avant-garde, close-up, voice-over
• preferred spellings: organize/realize/recognize; storytelling, travelled, scriptwriter, scriptwriting, arthouse, marketplace, per cent (two words), email, online (one word); web site (2 words); DVD, CD-ROM (all caps), program (not programme)
• foreign language words to be designated with italics (exceptions are words that are considered anglicized) Latin phrases such as op. cit. and etc. are not italicized)
• Cassavetes’ films, Mills’ books (not Cassavetes’s films, Mills’s books)
• USA, UK, USSR, LA (not U.S.A., U.K. etc.)

Metro magazine and Screen Education magazine use the Oxford Guide to Style, The Oxford Dictionary for Writers and Editors, the Oxford Dictionary of Foreign Words & Phrases and the Oxford Dictionary. For all questions about grammar, punctuation and preferred spellings, please refer to one of the above.

FURTHER INFORMATION
Australian Teachers of Media (ATOM) is a non-profit organization and, unfortunately, we are unable to pay our contributors anything representative of the effort that goes into an article. Book reviews are unpaid (the reviewer keeps their review copy), whilst feature articles attract an honorarium fee (this varies slightly according to word length).

Please note that Metro and Screen Education are available online. We ask that all writers sign a release form allowing their work to be published in this format.

If you would like to join our email Broadcast List for either Metro or Screen Education, please forward email details to the office.

For further information, contact Peter Tapp at:

ATOM
Metro & Screen Education magazines
P.O. Box 2040
St Kilda West
Victoria 3182 Australia
ph: (03) 9525 5302; fax: (03) 9537 2325;
email: editor@atom.org.au
www.metromagazine.com.au

¹ M. Helms, 'Dark City: Interview with Andrew Mason and Alex Proyas', Cinema Papers, no.124, May, 1998.