There are various styles of writing which are used for academic assignments, especially research papers. The style to be used is usually mentioned in the guidelines. It is very important that you stick to the style mentioned in the guidelines because it is one aspect by which your research paper would be judged. A Chicago style research paper is a common assignment for history students.

Chicago style has been found to suit subjects like history, literature and arts, even though it offers a separate type of documentation for scientific subjects. It is important to learn the most important aspects of this style of writing if you are an arts student. The Chicago writing style offers a humanities documentation method and a scientific method. Both are totally different and each one is used mainly for the specified group of subjects.

The most important thing to understand about the various styles of writing is that the main difference between them resides in the citation style. There are indeed rules regarding the margins and alignment of words, lines and paragraphs but citation style remains the most prominent of all. The citation style is different for the humanities method and the scientific method in the Chicago style of writing.

The humanities style of citation in a Chicago style research paper requires footnotes and a separate bibliographical page. The footnotes, as you might be aware, are notes added at the end of each page and connected to the cited portions with a number or pattern. Chicago style encourages use of numbers as the link between footnotes and citations. To place a footnote, you need to first number it and mention the same number after the citation, and above the last letter of the last line of the cited part.

If there are multiple citations on the same page, make sure that you have linked them correctly to the footnotes. A mistake with the number can ruin the whole purpose of the footnotes. The footnotes are supposed to include ‘the author, the title and the page number’. The humanities method also asks for a bibliographical reference page towards the end of your research paper, separately. This will contain the information on ‘the author, the title, place of publication, the publisher and the year in which it was published’. This is to be done in alphabetical order.

Another important thing to be noted about the Chicago style of citation is that you need not reverse the names of the authors as you do in the other writing styles. The names are written in the order of first name first and last name last. This is also important because while placing the names in alphabetical order, your professor will be looking for names with reference to the first names if it a Chicago style research paper.

The scientific method of citation asks for in-text citations or parenthetical references. The information on ‘author, date and page number’ will be placed next to the cited paragraph or cited information.

If you need more information on the writing style you may refer to the Chicago style manual. If you are not comfortable about using this style for writing, you may opt to get a Chicago style research paper written for you by professional custom writing services.