Title Pages and Formatting

Your essay should have a title, which can be a question. If you want your paper to have a subtitle then the accepted practice is to separate it from the title with a colon. I.E. ``Villain or Victim: A political appraisal of King Richard the Third``. All words in the title are supposed to be Capitalized except for "bridging" words such as: an, if, and, the, etc. Although these words ARE to be capitalized if they are the first word in the title, or the first word after a colon. Titles in Chicago style should never be more then a sentence.

The title, your name, the name of the course and instructor, and the date of submission of the essay should appear on the title page.The recommended choice is just to copy the style you see here.

Confusingly enough title page of an essay is supposed to have a page number at the bottom of the page with no name beside it, whereas every other page should have the page number in the top right corner beside the last name of the paper's author. Page numbers and names need to be inserted as headers, see the help file of your word processor for information on how to do this.

The Chicago style stipulates that essays of less then 5 pages should not have a title page; and that all the information that would normally be on the title page should instead be located in the top left of the first page of the essay except for the title which is supposed to be centered, but instructors thoughts on the matter vary. It`s best to ask in cases where you are unsure.

If you write your Professors name with Mr/Mrs. instead of Doctor as a prefix, I can assure you they will notice.