Policies
Contributors
Honors students currently or previously enrolled at Liberty University.
Contributions
All articles published in The Kabod were written by Honors students while enrolled in an Honors section at Liberty University or while enrolled in a class in which the student petitioned for Honors credit at Liberty University. They received an “A” from the professor for the assignment, and they demonstrated not only impeccable writing, reasoning, synthesizing, and documenting skills, but also kâbôd for their insight and analytical ingenuity.
Subject
Liberty University’s Honors Program is interdisciplinary. Therefore, the articles published in The Kabod cross the curriculum and are identified by discipline or as interdisciplinary.
Audience
The articles competitively target the academic market appropriate to the discipline. One should assume that readers of literary criticism, for example, will be familiar with primary texts, and that theological papers will be read by Christians who believe that the Bible is the infallible Word of God.
No paper contains any content or verbiage that might be deemed offensive to any group of people or reflect poorly on Liberty University.
Procedures for Submission
The paper may be submitted by either the student or the professor, but it must receive prior recommendation for publication by the professor of class, to be confirmed by the information supplied on the paper’s title page.
Author
The title page should list the following:
– Professor of class
– Professor’s email address
– Name and number of class
– Date that the paper received an “A”
– Student’s name
– Student’s email address
– Paper’s discipline (interdisciplinary, English, history, religion, philosophy, etc.)
Abstract
All papers must include an abstract of no more than 120 words.
Software Format
All articles should be attached as Microsoft Word, RTF, or editable PDF files. Any graphics must be scanned at a minimum of 300 dpi, saved as JPEG or Tiff.
Font/Spacing
– 12-point Times New Roman
– Double spaced, except for Turabian quotes and footnotes.
– 1” margins
– 5-spaced tabs.
– 1 space after stop punctuation.
Length
Articles should be 4,000 to 10,000 words (or 8-20 ds pp) plus bibliography.
Style
– Follow American punctuation and spelling.
– Comply with the latest edition of the discipline’s academic styles (MLA, APA, Turabian, etc.)
– If following MLA, use endnotes instead of footnotes but only for tangential information; otherwise use in-text parenthetical citations. Supply a Works Cited page.
Unacceptable Sources
– Publications by Gale or Cengage Learning such as Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism, Contemporary Literary Criticism, and Gale Virtual Reference Library.
– Publications by Magill/Salem P, like Masterplots, Critical Surveys of Literature, and Critical Insights.
– Any collections of summaries and abstracts like CliffsNotes, SparkNotes, YorkNotes, or ColeNotes.
– General encyclopedias and dictionaries and Wikipedia.
– Criticism or other articles published on www. You may use data and historical documents published www as long as they are reliable. Primary text found on www is acceptable.
– Reviews are not considered literary criticism. They may be used as historical sources but not as literary analysis.
– Newspapers and commercial magazines unless they have historical information that is reliable. Again, they may not be treated as literary criticism.
Acceptable Sources
– Academic sources that have been “peer-reviewed”; before they were accepted for publication, they were read by experts on their subject, checked for accuracy, and went through a series of editing processes to ensure accuracy, coherency, and rigor.
– Academic sources that have been “refereed,” meaning that other scholars wrote reviews on them.
– Most articles and books that have been published by university presses.
– Articles and books that have been published elsewhere and are now available through electronic databases. An example of this is JSTOR, one of the databases provided by www.liberty.edu/library.
– Sources deemed reliable and appropriate.
– The Bible, but be aware of hypostatization. Not everyone agrees in the premise that the Bible is the infallible Word of God and therefore unless the paper’s discipline is religion, the writer should not build arguments on that premise.
We Will Not Publish
– Papers that are basically biographies of famous persons.
– Plot summaries.
– Reviews of works.
– Bibliographical essays or summaries of other criticism or other published work unless they are integral to a discussion and are brief.
– Literary analysis that is not driven by some form of literary theory, i.e., postcolonialism, structuralism, feminism, Marxism, deconstruction, etc.
– Statements that are not supported by argumentation.
– Papers without a controlling thesis or without a thesis that is analytical and insightful.
– Poorly written papers.
– Multiple grammatical, mechanical, and typing errors.
– Plagiarized papers.
– Creative writing (submit to The Lamp instead).
– Description of creative projects like a student’s art show, magazine, musical production, etc.
– Anything offensive or profane.
We Welcome
Well-written papers with original, logical insight:
– Articles of kâbôd that glorify God and honor Liberty University. This does not mean, however, that the articles must be written for a Christian audience.
– Academic arguments with academic rigor that will compete academically with other universities.
Selection
Articles submitted by either the student or the professor do not guarantee publication. If the paper is approved, it will probably require some revision requested by the Managing Editor before it will be published.
Remuneration
Liberty University and its Honors Program will not compensate the contributors with anything other than publication.
Copyright
The author of the paper/article retains all copyrights to his/her property and needs no permission to publish it elsewhere.
For Further Information
Visit the Honors Suite on the third floor of the Jerry Falwell Library.