^* This column was written by Ed Battistella and Mark Aronoff. The authors are grateful to Sally Thomason, Bill Bright, Eve Clark, Brian Joseph, Keren Rice, Richard Sproat, and Walt Wolfram, for helpful comments on an earlier draft.

¹ If a book review covers more than one book, the length limit is relaxed (though not necessarily proportional to the number of books reviewed).

² In the June 1995 Editor's Department, Mark Aronoff noted the policy change to standardize the length of reviews at 1,200–1,500 words. Some readers reported to us that they understood this to mean that book notices would be eliminated as a category. That was not the intention.

³ Sally Thomason describes the Discussion Notes section in more detail in her Editor's Department columns in Language 64(3) and 69(3). As she points out there, Discussion Notes revives the category of Miscellanea that had been published in Language from 1931–1956.