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Manuscript Guidelines for The Journal of David Foster Wallace Studies

  1. The Journal of David Foster Wallace Studies uses The Chicago of Manual Style, 17th ed. for manuscript format and citations. Any piece that does not adhere to CMS will be returned for resubmission. Consult The Chicago Manual of Style for guidelines.
  2. All submissions must be submitted electronically in Microsoft Word format.
  3. Before submitting your essay, double check all quotations for accuracy; we may or may not have access to all of your source material. Likewise, make sure that all of your page numbers (for quotations and paraphrases) are accurate.

All manuscript submissions should:

  1. come with a cover sheet, containing the title of the piece, the author’s name and affiliation (if applicable), and a brief abstract of the essay (no more than 200 words).
  2. be in 12-pt. Times New Roman font.
  3. be between 6,000 and 8,000 words in length (unless permission is otherwise granted by the editorial board), be devoid of any identification of the author’s name (except on the cover sheet), and use U.S. English.
  4. use numbered footnotes for both citations and in-text asides/ notes (though, despite DFW’s example, please use the latter sparingly). Per CMS 17, do not use ibid. for recurring sources.
  5. contain a full bibliography, which should appear after the text of the essay, and include Bibliography as a heading.
  6. reflect standard U.S. English usage for punctuation, quotation marks, and spelling. Please convert British, Canadian, and Australian spellings to their U.S. equivalents prior to submission.
  7. leave headers and footers blank, except for page numbers.
  8. use the abbreviations on the following page in the footnotes when citing Wallace’s work/ books about Wallace. When first referencing the source, use standard CMS format, but then use these abbreviations for recurring instances.


BOS        The Broom of the System

GCH        Girl with Curious Hair

IJ        Infinite Jest

SFT        A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again

BI        Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

EM        Everything and More: A Compact History of ∞

CL        Consider the Lobster

OB        Oblivion

TIW        This is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life

TPK        The Pale King

BFN        Both Flesh and Not

SR        Signifying Rappers

CW        Conversations with David Foster Wallace, ed. Stephen J. Burn