Deborah Core offers practical guidance for beginning seminary students who feel overwhelmed and under-prepared to write the number and quality of papers their courses require. The book begins with reflections on writing as a sacred action, then addresses such practical matters as choosing and researching a topic; outlining, drafting, and polishing a paper; and using the proper format for footnotes and bibliography. Also included are sample papers in MLA and Chicago styles and an overview of grammar and usage.

The SBL Handbook of Style has been thoroughly updated to reflect the latest practices among scholars, editors, and publishers as well as to take into account current trends in scholarly publishing. This edition has been meticulously supplemented with important new subject matter that fills gaps in the first edition. New material include: clearer and more comprehensive guideline for authors in preparing manuscripts for publication, including a discussion on Unicode fonts; an expanded list of authorities; expanded guidelines on style rules for numbers; a list of ancient Near Eastern archaeological site names; an expansive discussion of the treatment of quranic sources; an expanded and improved list of capitalization and spelling examples; addition of a section on Islamic dates; an introduction on the principles of transliteration and transcription; addition of capital letters to the transliteration scheme for Greek; a substantially revised and updated discussion of Akkadian transliteration; addition of Sumerian, Hittite, Old Persian, Moabite, Edomite, Ammonite, Syriac, Mandaic, Ethiopic, Arabic, and Turkish to the list of ancient languages treated; a more complete discussion of the rules of citation; new rules for the treatment of Latin titles; a comprehensive list of publishers and their places of publication; an explanation of electronic resource identifiers (DOIs versus URLs); detailed guidelines for citing a variety of electronic sources; clearer and more comprehensive guidelines for preparing indexes; an expanded list of technical abbreviations; expanded coverage of rabbinic works and ancient codices; a thoroughly updated and expanded list of secondary sources.