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The Kairos Style Guide

• Modified APA Citation Style
• Design Elements and Coding
• Required Metadata
• XHTML Requirements

The Kairos Style Guide

Modified APA Citation Style

With one exception, Kairos follows APA style (5th edition of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association): We include the first name of the cited author(s) or editor(s) in each instance on the references page and also include first names when the author(s) or editor(s) are mentioned in in-text citations for the first time in each lexia. For those familiar with earlier editions of APA, this site covers the changes that accompany the 5th edition.

Examples of Modified APA Style in Kairos

In-text citations selected from Who's Writing?: Aristotelian Ethos and the Author Position in Digital Poetics by Kristie S. Fleckenstein:

• Elaine Scarry (1999) in On Beauty connected aesthetics to justice, reminding us that aesthetics and ethics are intertwined in complex ways.
• Brian Lennon (2000) hypothesized digital visual poetics as a "zona inexplorada of a never wholly discovered, validated, or otherwise bounded networld field" (p. 68).
• John Kirby (1990) argued that the great works of classical Greek literature were characterized by what he called the great triangle of peitho (persuasion), eros (desire), and bia (force or strength).

References page citations selected from Constructing a Tool for Assessing Scholarly Webtexts by Allison Warner:

• Crowley, Sharon. (1994). Ancient rhetorics for contemporary students. New York: Macmillan.
• Kalmbach, James. (2006). Reading the archives: Ten years of nonlinear (Kairos) history. Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, Pedagogy, 11(1). Retrieved November 12, 2006, from http://kairos.technorhetoric.net/11.1/binder.html?topoi/kalmbach/index.html
• Ong, Walter. (1982). Orality and literacy: The technologizing of the word. New York: Routledge.

General Format for In-Text Citations in APA Style

Many Kairos webtexts are submitted by authors more familiar with MLA style. With that in mind, what follows are some of the most common changes authors will have to make to be sure a webtext follows APA style for in-text citations:

• A citation should include the name(s) of the author(s), publication date, and page number (when applicable).

  For example, "A new paradigm built around complexity could produce a post-dialectical understanding of contemporary pedagogies of invention for the emerging scene produced by digital technology" (Hawk, 2007, p. 7).

• When the author name is used in a signal statement, the publication year follows the author name, and the page information appears at the end of the citation.

  Byron Hawk (2007) argued, "A new paradigm built around complexity could produce a post-dialectical understanding of contemporary pedagogies of invention for the emerging scene produced by digital technology" (p. 7).

• APA uses past tense for author signal statements. Example: "Hawk (2006) argued...."
• Use an ampersand between the names of multiple authors or editors in parenthetical citations and reference lists (Selfe & Hawisher, 2004, p. 38).
• Use block quotation format when including citations of 40 or more words. Start the block quotation on a new line with a blockquote indentation and omit quotation marks:

  Accordingly, the NCTE Executive Committee adopted a definition of 21st Century Literacies in 2008:

  Literacy has always been a collection of cultural and communicative practices shared among members of particular groups. As society and technology change, so does literacy. Because technology has increased the intensity and complexity of literate environments, the twenty-first century demands that a literate person possess a wide range of abilities and competencies, many literacies. These literacies—from reading online newspapers to participating in virtual classrooms—are multiple, dynamic, and malleable.

General Format for References Page in APA Style

Many Kairos webtexts are submitted by authors more familiar with MLA style. With that in mind, what follows are some of the most common differences authors will have to make to be sure a webtext follows APA style for a final references page:

• The final listing of sources in APA is called a “References” page, not “Works Cited” or “Bibliography.”
• The date is usually in second position (right behind author(s) or titles) and included within parentheses followed by a period.

A sample reference:

Selber, Stuart. (2004). Multiliteracies for a digital age. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press.

More Format Tips for APA References Page

• Capitalize only the first letter of article/book titles and the first letter after a colon if there’s one in the title (with the exception of proper nouns and acronyms):

  Selfe, Richard. (2004). Sustainable computer environments: Cultures of support in English studies and language arts. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press.

• (However, do use capital letters for titles for in-text references)
• Article titles are not italicized and not put in quotation marks:

  DeVoss, Dànielle Nicole, Cushman, Ellen, & Grabill, Jeffrey T. (2005). Infrastructure and composing: The when of new-media writing. College Composition and Communication, 57(1), 14-44.

• Use “&” instead of “and” when listing multiple author or editor names:

  Selfe, Cynthia L., & Hawisher, Gail E. (Eds.). (2004). Literate lives in the information age: Narratives of literacy from the United States. New York: Routledge.

• Multiple publications by the same author should be listed in chronological order, with names spelled out in all instances. If publications occur in the same year by a single author (or co-authors), add letters to the year of publication and list the entries in alphabetical order by title. Include the letters -- e.g., (Wysocki, 2004a) or (Wysocki, 2004b) -- when making in-text references.

  Wysocki, Anne Frances. (2004a). Learning from Fatty Bear: Calling forth gender in children’s interactive multimedia. In Brian Huot, Charles Bazerman, & Elizabeth Stroble (Eds.), Multiliteracies for the twenty-first century (pp. 227-252). Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press.
  
  Wysocki, Anne Frances. (2004b). Openings and justifications. In Anne Frances Wysocki, Johndan Johnson-Eilola, Cynthia L. Selfe, & Geoffrey Sirc, Writing new media: Theory and applications for expanding the teaching of composition (pp. 1-24). Logan, UT: Utah State University Press.

• Italicize journal titles and issue numbers (e.g., Computers and Composition, 20, 415–426.)
• University press names are spelled out:

  Labov, William. (1972). Sociolinguistic patterns. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

• For electronic references, there is no final punctuation and the URL should be linked to open in a new browser window:

  WIDE Research Center Collective. (2005). Why teach digital writing? Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, Pedagogy, 10(1). Retrieved February 8, 2006, from http://kairos.technorhetoric.net/10.1/binder2.html?coverweb/wide/index.html

Design Elements and Coding

• External style sheets are required to facilitate the editing process. Please do not use inline styles.
• The H1 tag is reserved. Please use H2 through H4 tags to format your webtext.
• Use alt-tags with each image to provide a clear and concise description of the image and improve accessibility.
• Please do not use blind links; choose link text that clearly identifies the linked document.
• Links to sites outside of the published webtext should open in a new window.
• Whenever possible, link to established sites whose links are not likely to change or disappear in order to avoid link rot.
• Do not link terminal punctuation.
• Leave a left margin of 80px for the Kairos Toolbar on all your pages.
• Please use character entities for ampersands (&) and em-dashes (—).
• If using proprietary presentation software (e.g., Flash, Quicktime, .wav, PDFs, etc.), please provide alternate versions of your text as external XML and/or multimodal transcripts to increase readabilty and accessibility of your webtext. In addition, you may be asked to submit the editable version (.fla, .doc, .aup, etc.) for editing by the staff once a piece has been accepted for publication.

XHTML Requirements

Prior to publication, all webtexts will be required to adhere to the basic standards of valid markup. The simplest approach is to code properly from the outset, rather than attempting to correct errors at the end of the editorial prcess. This primarily requires a few simple steps to ensure that your code will validate. (Tip: You can use http://validator.w3.org/ to review your code at any time during the development process.)

We will provide assistance with coding and design issues as needed during the editorial process, but we also recommend that authors of webtexts familiarize themselves with best practices in coding (your code should be as "grammatically correct" as your text).

The following is a short list of requirements that published webtexts will be expected to meet prior to final publication:

• HTML files must include a DTD and should declare the xml name space and language in the html tag (these should be the first lines in the file):
  
  <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
  
  You may copy and paste these two lines into each page of your webtext.
• All element and attribute names must be lowercase (e.g. use alt, not ALT; p not P, etc.)
• Attribute values must always be quoted (e.g. width="75" not width=75)
• All non-empty elements that have an opening tag must have a matching closing tag. For example:
  a break must be coded as <br />, list items must end in </li>, and img tags require a closing /
• All image tags must include alt tags that describe the image and its function within the webtext