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There are many different presentational styles around. The Department of English Literature prefers the style approved by the Modern Language Association, known simply as ‘MLA Style’. All written work submitted to the Department should conform to the following guidelines.
I. PRESENTATION AND LAYOUT
Essays should be typed or wordprocessed, double-spaced.
Pages should be numbered consecutively in Arabic numerals, including the final page which comprises the list of Works Cited. The page number should appear on the top right-hand corner of each page.
The beginnings of paragraphs should be indented five spaces from the left-hand margin. No additional space should be inserted between paragraphs.
Use a clean font in a size that is clearly legible. Times New Roman (12 point) is ideal.
As well as the use of grammatical sentences, it is important to use paragraphs intelligently. Each paragraph should represent a coherent element within a developing argument.
II. TITLES
Ideally, ITALICISE (or if necessary underline) the titles of: books, plays; long poems published as books; pamphlets; and periodicals (newspapers, magazines and journals).
Examples, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit; Henry IV, Part 1; Paradise Lost; The Scotsman; Studies in Scottish Literature.
ENCLOSE WITHIN SINGLE QUOTATION MARKS, and do not underline, the titles of articles; essays; short stories; short poems; songs; chapters of books; unpublished works (such as lectures, speeches and dissertations).
Examples, ‘The Traffic in Women: Notes on the “Political Economy” of Sex’; ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’; ‘The Library Window’; ‘To His Coy Mistress’; ‘The Flower of Scotland’; ‘Judges’ (in Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit).
This distinction is made in order to avoid ambiguity or confusion: ‘King Lear is confused’ is a comment on the character of that name; ‘King Lear is confused’ is a judgment on the play. ‘"High Windows" is Philip Larkin's finest achievement’ refers to a single poem; ‘High Windows is Philip Larkin's finest achievement’ refers to a complete collection.
III. PUNCTUATION
The sense of your essay depends on its punctuation as well as on the words you choose. These are some common problem areas:
a. Capitalization. In titles capitalize the first letter of the first word and of all the principal words including nouns and proper adjectives
(e.g., To the Lighthouse, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, A Passage to India, Sons and Lovers, The Novel: Modern Essays in Criticism).
Capitalize references to parts of a specific work, e.g., Mahood's Introduction (in Twelfth Night), Morrell’s Preface (in Four English Comedies).
b. Exclamation marks should be sparingly used.
c. Italics. As well as italicising (or if necessary underlining) the titles of published books, plays, pamphlets, periodicals, and long poems, also italicise foreign words used in an English text (except quotations, titles of articles, proper names and foreign words anglicized through usage).
The underlining or italicising of words, phrases or sentences for emphasis should be done sparingly.
d. Quotation marks. Be consistent in your punctuation. If you use single quotation marks, use them in the same circumstances throughout. The British system uses single quotation marks first, double quotation marks for quotations within quotations:
According to Northrop Frye, ‘The word “grace” with all its Renaissance overtones from the graceful courtier of Castiglione to the gracious God of Christianity, is a most important thematic word in Shakespearean comedy.’
e. Rhetorical questions, i.e., questions asked for effect rather than genuine enquiry, should be sparingly asked in your essay.
f. Square brackets. Use them for a parenthesis within a parenthesis, to enclose interpolations in a quotation, or to complete missing information. For example:
F.P. Wilson suggests that ‘in Marlowe’s share of the play [Doctor Faustus] there is nothing of predestination and reprobation’.
g. Colons and Semicolons. These are often under-used: use them sensibly. In particular, where part of a sentence could stand on its own as a separate sense-unit or sentence (as in the last sentence) it should be preceded by a colon or semi-colon and not just a comma.
IV. NAMES OF PERSONS
Poets, playwrights, novelists are customarily referred to by their surnames, e.g., Shakespeare, Marlowe, Goldsmith, Woolf. In essays, one refers simply to Byron (rather than Lord Byron) or Tennyson (rather than Alfred Lord Tennyson) or Woolf (rather than Virginia Woolf). Exceptions would include Eliot (which might refer to T.S. or George) or James (where it might refer to Henry or William). Well known authorities cited in your text (e.g., Barthes, Foucault, Freud, Marx) may be referred to similarly. When less well known literary critics are first mentioned in your essay the full name should be given; on subsequent occasions in the same essay the surname only is used.
V. NUMERALS
a. In general, numbers of fewer than three digits should be spelled out in words. However, if Arabic numerals are used for numbers over 99, use them also for smaller numbers in the same sentence or related groups of sentences.
b. Dates. Be consistent in your style: either '17 August 1991' or 'August 17, 1991,' but not both. Correspondingly, use either 'August 1991' or 'August, 1991,' but not both; 'in 1981-82' or 'from 1981 to 1982'; '500 B.C.' but 'A.D. 500'. In your text, spell out references to centuries, e.g., 'the nineteenth and twentieth centuries'.
VI. QUOTATIONS
a. Quote accurately. If you underline words for emphasis, you should indicate that the emphasis is yours. Use ‘sic’ sparingly [within square brackets] to show that the error appears in the original and is not yours. Example:
The Home Herald printed the mayor’s letter, which was an appeal to his ‘dear fiends [sic] and fellow citizens’.
b. Ellipsis. For ellipsis within a sentence, use three . . . spaced periods, leaving a space before the first period. Quotations that are complete sentences should end with periods even though matter in the original may have been omitted. To indicate ellipsis after the conclusion of a complete sentence, use four periods with no space before the first. . . .
c. Integrated quotations. Verse quotations of part of a line or a single line are normally run-on, i.e., integrated in your text and placed within quotation marks. Lines of verse are separated by a slash (/). Example:
Cummings admires his father for moving ‘through dooms of love / through sames of am through haves of give’, for his resilience and graciousness of spirit in confronting the vicissitudes of life.
Prose quotations of fewer than four lines should be run-on as part of your text, placed within quotation marks, and the sentence which includes the quotation should make grammatical sense.
d. Long quotations. When a quotation extends for more than four typed lines of prose or three lines of poetry, it should be introduced by a colon (unless it is run-on) and set off from the text by indenting the entire quotation ten spaces from the left margin. It should be double spaced and there should be no additional space above or below. No quotation marks are required when it has been set off from the text in this way. It should not be italicised and should not be centre-justified.
VII. REFERENCES IN THE TEXT
Proper referencing is a key part of any essay, allowing your reader (and you, in future) to check or work further with the sources you have used. Accurate and full acknowledgement of these sources also ensures that you avoid any risk of plagiarism – by showing clearly and exactly how and from whom you have derived any ideas or expressions not originally your own.
While footnotes and endnotes were once the convention, they have now been replaced by brief citations within the text. Your reader should be able to find the full citation for all of your references in your Works Cited List which should appear at the end of your essay.
In-text references should appear in brackets within your main text. Where the identity of the source is apparent from the context, only a page number is required. Where the source is not apparent, you should provide the author’s name and the page number. Here are some examples:
According to Fussell, ‘the Oxford Book of English Verse presides over the Great War in a way that has never been fully appreciated’ (159).
As one critic has asserted, ‘the Oxford Book of English Verse presides over the Great War in a way that has never been fully appreciated’ (Fussell 159).
The Oxford Book of English Verse played a defining role in the culture of the First World War (Fussell 159).
Citation - a word of warning
Students should exercise particular caution and care in the use of this form of citation. It is imperative that the reader should always be able to distinguish your voice and argument from that of the critics you cite. Perhaps the best way to ensure this is to quote directly from secondary sources, so that the reader knows which sentence(s) you have identified as especially valuable? But in all cases, students should avoid simply ventriloquising critical arguments and conduct instead a critical engagement with them. For example, do not accept interpretations in critical works as matters of fact; demonstrate to the reader of your essay the ways in which you have produced a thoughtful response to the critics that you haveemployed.
It is always the responsibility of the student to ensure that there is no confusion in an essay about the origin of its arguments, and students should therefore be especially confident about the use of this form of critical citation. It should not be the responsibility of the reader to ascertain which voice in your essay is really your own.
Where more than one work by the same author is being cited, then the short title of the relevant work should be included:
(Fussell, Great War 159).
Content footnotes, on the other hand, may be included but should be kept to a minimum. They should be consecutively numbered (in superscript), single spaced, and appear at the bottom of the page.
Where the main text reads:
It has been asserted that the Oxford Book of English Verse played a defining role in the culture of the First World War (Fussell 159).1
The content note might read:
1While Fussell’s emphasis on polite reading practices held sway until relatively recently, historical accounts have since emerged which emphasise the importance of popular working class culture in the British trenches.
For further advice on the use of in-text references you should consult
http://www.dianahacker.com/resdoc/p04_c08_s1.html
VIII. WORKS CITED
A list of all works cited should appear on a new page at the end of your essay, arranged in alphabetical order. Use quotation marks (but not italics or underlining) for titles of articles, essays, short stories, short poems, songs, chapters and sections of books. Use italics or underlining for titles of published books, plays, long poems, pamphlets, periodicals, operas, films and classical works. The first line of each entry should be indented.
Please note: the following are just a few examples of the different kinds of entries that you might have to use. If you can’t find what you are looking for here, you should consult
http://www.dianahacker.com/resdoc/p04_c08_s2.html.
1. A book with a single author: the simplest form of reference.
Fussell, Paul. The Great War and Modern Memory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975.
2. Two or more books by a single author
Fussell, Paul. The Great War and Modern Memory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975.
---. Wartime: Understanding and Behaviour in the Second World War.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989.
3. A book by multiple authors
Hughes, Linda, and Michael Lund. The Victorian Serial. Charlottesville: University Press
of Virginia, 1991.
4. An edited collection of essays
Watt, Ian, ed. Pride and Prejudice: A Collection of Critical Essays.
Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1963.
5. A work in a collection
Brower, Reuben A. ‘Light and Bright and Sparkling: Irony and Fiction in Pride and Prejudice. ’
Jane Austen: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Ian Watt. Englewood Cliffs ,
N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1963: 62-75.
6. An edition
Shakespeare, William. Anthony and Cleopatra. Ed. John Dover Wilson.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968.
---. Twelfth Night. Ed. J. M. Lothian. London: Methuen, 1975.
7. An article in a journal
Reiss, Edmund. ‘Medieval Irony.’ Journal of the History of Ideas 42.2 (1981): 209-26.
8. A web site
The quality of web site content varies enormously, from refereed journals by reputable academic presses to discussion groups for teenage fans of Wuthering Heights. You should therefore be particularly cautious about the electronic sources that you use. As with printed sources, there is a prescribed format for the citation of electronic texts. Entries should include (where applicable) the name of the author, title of the web page, title of the site, date of publication, date it was accessed, and url:
Jones, Mary. ‘Why read Wordsworth?’ Life and Work of Wordsworth. 2002. 15 Nov. 2004
<http://www.englishistory.net/wordsworth.html>.
Detailed guidance regarding the documentation of web sites, in their various manifestations, can be found at http://www.dianahacker.com/resdoc/p04_c08_s2.html.
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