A Manual for Writers of Term Papers, Theses, and Dissertations [antikvár]

Preface Kate L. Turabian designed tiiis manual as a guide to suitable style for presenting formal papers—term papers, theses, dissertations—in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Over the course of sixty years the book has become established as one of the basic reference works for undergraduate and graduate students in many disciplines. This sixth edition has been prompted by publication of the fourteenth edition of The Chicago Manual of Style and by new guidelines on dissertations from the Office of Academic Publications at the University of Chicago. The University of Chicago Press receives many inquiries about Kate Turabian and the history of her manual. A reviewer for Quill and Scroll wrote that Turabian's name had become "part of the folklore of American higher education," and she has been called "the Emily Post of scholarship." So legendary has she become that some believe she is an invention. In fact, Kate Turabian worked for over thirty years at the University of Chicago, where she was dissertation secretary from 1930 to 1958. She died in 1987 at age ninety-four, a few months after publication of the fiftieth anniversary edition of her manual. Commenting on the more than eleven thousand theses and dissertations she inspected for the university, she told the Chicago Tribune, "I learned early that modern young people have ideas of their own on grammar and punctuation." It was to correct and guide these ideas that she wrote the instruction sheets that were given out to graduate students at the university She later adapted materials from the Press's Manual of Style to expand the guidelines into a sixty-eight-page booklet, copyrighted by the University of Chicago in 1937 and distributed first by the campus bookstore, then by the Press. The University of Chicago Press published the book under its own imprint in a revised edition issued in 1955. Three years later Kate Turabian retired as dissertation secretary, but she remained involved in the next two revisions of her manual, published in 1967 and 1973. The fifth edition, substantially revised and enlarged by ! i i. 'I.'i' vn I I ; I . . I