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Essay Writing Guide The Program offers a wide range of courses, which are taught in a variety of ways. These reflect the nature of particular courses and the texts studied in them, and the attitudes of individual tutors to the complex questions of what literature is, and how it should be discussed. Just as you may expect to encounter a range of critical attitudes to literature (within courses, between one year level and another, and between one course and another), so too you may find that expectations about what constitutes an acceptable essay or class paper vary somewhat from one tutor to another. Your tutor will discuss with you, early in the year, just what he or she expects from you. This is not to suggest that you are limited to expressing an approach which coincides with that of your tutor, however. If you are in any doubt about how to go about writing an essay or class paper, you should consult your tutor in advance of the due date. In general, second and third-year English courses require the writing of two kinds of work, the exercise and the longer essay. The former will usually require you to comment on the significance of a given passage, whereas an essay requires the presentation of a sustained argument, which demonstrates your ability to place textual analysis within a more general kind of discourse. Whether you are writing an exercise or an essay, you should avoid extensive paraphrase - summarising narrative content ('what happens'), or restating in your own words what you take to be the general sense of a text. Sometimes it may be helpful to include brief comments of this kind for the sake of clarity, but you should be aware that paraphrase, in itself, has no intellectual value. If you feel your argument would be strengthened by making comparisons with other books you have read, whether inside or outside a particular course, feel free to make them. Whether you are writing an essay or an exercise, you should not present work which is a patchwork of critics' views and opinions. Always make clear what you think, and if you do use a critic's work, don't rely on this to make your own points for you. A good general rule is to follow quotations with a comment at least as long as the quotation itself. It is important to allow sufficient time to write at least one draft of an exercise or essay before you write a final version. You should also check your work thoroughly before you submit it; as a way of picking up expression problems and errors. Many people find it useful to read their work aloud. If it doesn't sound right, it certainly won't read well! Here are a few common grammatical errors that you should correct before you submit your work. Misuse of the apostrophe is very common in the media, advertisements etc., and you should carefully avoid this mistake.
Here is a list of some frequent grammatical errors which you should check your work by before it is submitted. Incomplete sentences Example: The narrator is a man who has been injured. A man who is also an outsider. And an American. This should be written: The narrator is a man who has been injured. He is also an outsider and an American. or even better: The narrator is a man who has been injured, an outsider and an American. Note that all sentences should contain a main verb. Apostrophes Example: The character's of the story
are Italian's. Example: The narrators feeling is one
of detachment, because its a foreign country. Example: The campaign has been supported
since it's inception by many prominent person's. 'Its' in the last two examples is grammatically equivalent to 'his' or 'her': we don't write hi's or he'r, so why write 'it's? Commas Commas, as a rule, come in pairs.
Do not write one or two sentence paragraphs. Each paragraph should include a topic sentence - making the main point of the paragraph - and other sentences that illustrate or extend the main point. The topic sentence can come anywhere in the paragraph but is usually at the beginning, and sometimes, for effect, at the end. This one has the topic sentence at the beginning. Length of paragraphs is important. Paragraphs that are too brief signal to the reader that you are not in control of your material. Therefore you should avoid one or two sentence paragraphs. On the other hand, paragraphs that are longer than six or seven sentences are difficult for the reader to perceive as a coherent statement. Used well, paragraphing organises your material into clear units and helps the reader follow the run of your argument. Quotations Quotations of less than about twenty words should be incorporated into your own text, and signalled by being enclosed in quotation marks. Longer quotations should be presented clearly by being indented and separated from your text. Do not use quotation marks and indentations. How to indicate a title The titles of all plays, novels, and books of criticism should be underlined (or, if your word-processor or typewriter permits, italicised). This convention also applies to long poetic works. For example: T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Julia Kristeva's Desire in Language. The titles of short poems, of poems which form part of a larger work, and of short stories should be indicated by single quotation marks. For example: Chaucer's 'Miller's Tale', Sylvia Plath's 'Lady Lazarus', James Joyce's 'The Dead'. The titles of journal articles should also be indicated by single quotation marks - see below. How to set out poetry If you quote more than a phrase or a few words from poetry, ensure that it is set out exactly as in the text. Example: D. H. Lawrence writes in his
poem 'Autumn at Taos' 'Over the rounded sides of the Rockies, the aspens
of autumn, the aspens of autumn, like yellow hair of a tigress'.
Exercises and essays presented for assessment must be written or typed (12 point), double spaced, on one side of the paper only and include a margin of 4cm on each page. Pages should be numbered and stapled together. The first page should be blank apart from the topic, written in full, your tutor's name, the time and day of your tutorial, the subject for which the essay is submitted and the date of submission. You must also attach a Statement of Authorship form to the first page of your essay. If you do not have access to a word processor, remember to write as legibly as possible. If you are using a word-processor, ensure that you use the best quality printer available to you, and avoid awkward word and line breaks. In whatever form you choose to submit work, always submit the original. It is your responsibility to keep a copy of all work submitted for assessment. Exercises and essays should be placed in the essay box. This is your responsibility, whether you place the essay in the box yourself or entrust it to someone else. If you post your essay it should be by registered mail. You need to include a stamped self-addressed envelope (of adequate size) for the return of essays at the end of semester. Check the Course Information sheet for due dates and information about extensions.
Acknowledgement and documentation Although it may be possible for you to write a good class exercise for which you have done little or no secondary reading, it is less likely that you will achieve a high result for an essay for which you have done no secondary reading, however impressive your attention to the text may be. You are expected to use the reading lists which are distributed for your course, and you will often find it useful to look in the library for further critical material. Accordingly, it is essential that you know how to use the material you read, and here the deadliest sin is plagiarism. The word comes from the Latin plagiarius, which means a torturer, plunderer, or kidnapper. Don't kidnap or plunder another writer's words or ideas, whether that writer be a published author or another student. Failure to cite the source of any material you borrow from someone else is a form of dishonesty, for which the Program (and the University) has serious penalties. There is of course nothing wrong with using the product of someone else's mind - research would not exist without such activity - but it is essential to make full acknowledgement. For further information see 'Using sources in your writing'. Even if you choose not to quote the exact words used by another writer - that is, by phrasing someone else's arguments in your own words - you must document the source of all borrowed material. If you quote a passage from a critic, the quotation must be in quotation marks, and it must be followed immediately by a parenthetical reference or a number referring the reader to a footnote (see below). This practice is also to be followed when you refer to another author's work without quoting from it directly. Do not leave your acknowledgement to the end of the paragraph which includes the borrowed material; it must be clear exactly what is being acknowledged. You do not need to reference/footnote all quotations from your primary set text - only quotations longer than one sentence, but you must reference every word/thought taken from critical material, including web-based material. Internet plagiarism is the same as other kinds of plagiarism, and the same penalties apply. It is your responsibility to provide full information about any web-based source which you have consulted. Random checks, using up-to-date search engines, are made of all work submitted. Under no circumstances should you use the services of web-based essay providers. For information about how to document a web-based source, see below. An example of plagiarism: This is a passage from an article by Walter Allen called 'Character and Environment in George Eliot's Fiction':
An essential first step in accurate documentation is to ensure that you take careful notes from any book or article you use. When you begin to take notes, write down the name of the author, the title of the work, and the page numbers on which any material you may want to use occurs. Failure to do this may result in inadvertent plagiarism and embarrassment to you. It is all too easy, particularly when one reads any quantity of secondary material within a short period, to forget to do this, and the mind has an uncanny way of convincing itself that something it has seen in print is in fact the product of its own invention! Certain terms have become part of the currency of critical discourse -'negative capability', 'objective correlative', 'intentionalist fallacy', and so on - and it is not always necessary to acknowledge their origin. Do not footnote fragments of two or three words. Referencing Two forms of referencing are used in English studies: parenthetical referencing, such as the MLA style, and footnote referencing, such as the MHRA style. Both are acceptable, the important thing is to reference all your sources and to be consistent. The English Program will accept, in undergraduate essays, most major forms of referencing, so if you are already familiar with one, even if it isn't a standard method for English studies (eg. Chicago, which is commonly used in social sciences), you may use it. Below are simplified examples of both systems. For detailed information on parenthetical referencing see the MLA Handbook. Parenthetical referencing (eg. MLA style) This system requires you to end you essay with a list of works cited (ie. the same thing as the reading list illustrated below). Your references are then placed in the text in an abbreviated form using author and date, just author, or author and short title. So, for example, you have used the following book in your essay: Valerie Traub, Desire and Anxiety: Circulations of Sexuality in Shakespearean Drama. At the end of your essay, in your List of Works Cited, write the reference like this:
In your essay, reference a quotation like this: 'The sexual economy of Twelfth Night is saturated with multiple erotic investments' (Traub !992: 130). Or you may use (Traub 130) or (Traub, Desire, 130). Even if you paraphrase, you must acknowledge your source: Twelfth Night contains many erotic investments (Traub 1992: 130). The edition of Twelfth Night you use must appear in your List of Works Cited, but you don't need to reference it every time you use it as Shakespeare 1966, just put the page number or act and scene number in your parenthesis. Articles are referenced similarly: in the Works Cited write them like this:
Make sure your List of Works Cited is in alphabetical order. The other referencing system used in English studies is the footnote style.
Even if you are writing a piece of work for which no secondary material has been used, it is necessary to acknowledge the edition of the primary text which you have used. Thus, if you are writing an exercise on Twelfth Night, your first quotation from the play would be followed by a footnote as follows. Your text: Orsino's 'fancy' is characterised by the association he makes between music and appetite in the very first words he speaks:
The footnote: 1 William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, edited by M.M. Mahood (Harmondsworth, 1968). In the case of this example, you need not give the page number of the quoted material, because you have indicated the act, scene, and line numbers in your text. Suppose, though, that you were to quote from the Introduction to this edition of the play, like this: Your text: The Penguin editor of the play argues that one way of presenting Malvolio is better than another: We live in the world of responsible executives, and if Malvolio is presented to us as one of them the tricks played on him appear cruel and unjustified - the spite of the old and impoverished gentry against the class who were, in the revolution of 1642, to be 'revenged on the whole pack' of them.2 The footnote: 2Twelfth Night, p. 36. Note that in the example given above only the title and page number are given; this is because you have provided the editor's name, and place and date of publication. The first mention of a work should always include: Author (first names or initial preceding surname,
as in a signature) The last item is followed by a full stop; all other items are followed by a comma unless they precede brackets. After your first documentation of a primary text (play, poem, work of prose fiction), it is unnecessary to provide further footnote references to that work. The result of doing so looks cumbersome. Subsequent reference to the text is indicated by parentheses after the material quoted or alluded to (the parentheses will enclose act, scene, and line numbers in the case of a play, line numbers in the case of a poem, and page numbers in the case of a novel). Brief quotations (a few words, or a couple of phrases) from your set text do not need to be annotated. You can assume that your tutor will identify the source. Subsequent documentation of a secondary text is made by an abbreviated form of reference. We suggest that you use simply the name of the author whose work you have cited in full in the earlier footnote, with the page number following. Suppose that you were writing an essay in which you were discussing the a number of critical perspectives from which a text might be approached, and that you had quoted thus from the British theorist Terry Eagleton. Your text: Terry Eagleton finds that deconstruction, in its refusal to engage with ideology, bears resemblances to the liberal humanist position, taking the work of F.R. Leavis as his example: Nothing is more striking in Leavis's 'great tradition' than the ideological filter which selects for such status literary texts which combine the liberal subject's rich giddying sense of its own transgressive powers with a paralytic awareness of its inexorable subjection to oppressive systems.3 If this were your first reference to the work quoted, your footnote would read as follows: 3 The Function of Criticism: From The Spectator to Post-Structuralism, (London, 1984), p. 99. [Because you have used the critic's name in your own text, it is not appropriate to give it again at the beginning of the footnote. If, on the other hand, you had written, 'A contemporary British Marxist commentator has observed...', it would have been necessary to give the name at the beginning of your note.] If you were to refer to the same critic's work again later in your essay, you would document it like this. Your text: In Eagleton's view, the most important post-war British critic is Raymond Williams,4 although non-Marxist commentators would probably not agree. The footnote: 4 Eagleton, 108. [Note that in this example there is no direct quotation from the work cited; the footnote number is placed directly after the material to which it refers. If the footnote number were to come at the end of your sentence there would be an implication that the whole sentence reflected Eagleton's opinion.] If, on the other hand, you were to quote from or refer to another work by the same author it would not be appropriate to use this abbreviated form of reference. Thus, In his discussion of the journal Scrutiny, Eagleton reminds us of Raymond Williams's remark that the only sure fact about the organic society is that it has always gone.5 The footnote: 5 Literary Theory: An Introduction (London, 1983), 36. In the examples which have been given above, you will see that all of the quoted material has been indented - written or typed with a left-hand margin inside the margin of your own essay text. If you are quoting only a few words, or a short sentence from a secondary source, it is not necessary to indent, but it is essential to provide a footnote with a number that follows as closely as possible the material to which you refer. All of the examples which have been given so far are books. The conventions for documenting journal articles and individual essays from anthologies of critical material are very similar. Here are some sample footnotes which apply to such material: 1 E. Talbot Donaldson, 'Idiom of Popular Poetry in "The Miller's Tale"', English Institute Essays 1950, edited by A.S. Downer (New York, 1951), reprinted in E. Talbot Donaldson, Speaking of Chaucer (New York, 1970), 13-29. [Note that here the original publication details of the essay are given, followed by the details of the most recent publication in which the essay is found.] 2 B. Page, 'Concerning the Host', Chaucer Review 4 (1970), 1-13. 3 C. C. Richardson, 'The Function of the Host in The Canterbury Tales', Texas Studies in Literature and Language 12 (1971), 325-44 (327). 4 Barbara Hill Rigney, '"A Wreath Upon the Grave": The Influence of Virginia Woolf on Feminist Critical Theory', in Criticism and Critical Theory, edited by Jeremy Hawthorn, Stratford-Upon-Avon Studies, second series (London, 1984), 73-82 (81). [Note that in the last two examples there are parentheses at the end of the notes. This indicates that the material from which you have quoted comes from the page indicated by the brackets.] When you are footnoting articles, use single quotation marks for the title, reserving double quotation marks for quoted material within the title. Follow the punctuation conventions shown in the examples given here. Footnoting electronic sources You must include all possible information about the site you have accessed. Provide (1) title of the work or database (2) author (if known; if not, write 'author unknown' (3) electronic publication number, date of publication or update (4) date of your access to the material. Example: your text As one recent commentator observes, 'I am skeptical about talking of movements in Australian poetry. So many divisions have been artificially applied, or retrospectively qualified.'1 1 'Pulped Factions' (author unknown). http://www.saltpublishing.com/pulped.html, November 2002, Accessed 29 May 2003. For further information, consult the Borchardt Library's 'Citing electronic sources: an introduction'. Any essay you write should conclude with a List of Works Cited, Reading List or Bibliography in which you should note all the works which you have read in preparing your essay. Your essay should indicate how each of these works has been used, so in general you should not include in a Reading List works to which a footnote reference has not been given. The conventions which govern the writing of a Reading List entry differ from those which govern the writing of a footnote. An entry in a Reading List is written in tabular form, rather than as a sentence, so a typical entry would begin with the surname of the author, followed by his or her initials or full name if this is provided in the work you are using. (Always follow the details as they are given on the title page (in the case of a book), or the heading (in the case of an article). The first component of a Reading List entry is separated from the remainder of the entry by a full stop rather than by a comma. Below are some examples, taken from the sample footnotes in the preceding section of this guide. The items in a Reading List should be listed in alphabetical order. READING LIST Donaldson, E. Talbot. 'Idiom of Popular Poetry in "The Miller's Tale"', English Institute Essays 1950, edited by AS Downer (New York, 1951). Reprinted in E. Talbot Donaldson, Speaking of Chaucer (New York, 1970), 13-2 . Page, B. 'Concerning the Host', Chaucer Review 4 (1970), 1-13. Richardson, C.C. 'The Function of the Host in The Canterbury Tales', Texas Studies in Literature and Language 12 (1971), 325-44. Rigney, Barbara Hill. '"A Wreath Upon the Grave": The Influence of Virginia Woolf on Feminist Critical Theory', in Criticism and Critical Theory, edited by Jeremy Hawthorn, Stratford-upon-Avon Studies, second series (London, 1984). Remember that there are three rules of documentation: be clear, be accurate and be consistent. As long as your documentation obeys these rules it will usually be acceptable in this Program.
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