READING ENGLISH AND WRITING ESSAYS: A STUDENT’S GUIDE Revised edition, September 2012
This booklet is intended to provide both generalized guidance for the study of English Literature at university and specific pointers on aspects of essay writing and presentation. For further help with your studies, you are encouraged to visit the Arts Faculty webpage www.bris.ac.uk/arts/skills, where you will find advice on, for example, note-taking and referencing, grammar skills, and online research. See also the University webpage www.bris.ac.uk/studentskills, which leads you to a searchable directory of free courses and resources covering issues such as time management, academic writing, critical thinking, presentation skills, the use of computing and library facilities, and so forth. Do make the most of what the University has to offer in terms of help and support. It is expected that this booklet will be revised periodically; comments, queries and suggestions for additions or improvements are most welcome. Please email these to stephen.james@bristol. ac.uk. Dr Stephen James Senior Lecturer Department of English
CONTENTS Reading English at University
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Independent Study: A Checklist of Weekly Activities
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Key Materials for Regular Reference
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Taking Notes in Seminars and Tutorials
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Taking Notes in Lectures
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Taking Notes from Books
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Giving a Tutorial or Seminar Presentation
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Planning and Writing Essays
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Plagiarism, and How to Avoid It
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THE STYLE GUIDE: Introduction
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A: Essay Format and Structure
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B: Punctuation
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C: Word Order and Word Relations
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D: Errors, Dangers and Grey Areas
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E: Quotations
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F: References and Footnotes
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G: Bibliography
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READING ENGLISH AT UNIVERSITY When studying an Arts-based subject at university, your time is largely your own. This can be both liberating and highly challenging; for many, it is the single hardest adjustment from schoollevel work. Full-time English students at Bristol are firmly expected to invest forty hours a week in their studies. For single-honours students, approximately six of these hours are covered by formal teaching (lectures, tutorials, seminars), while joint-honours students will typically have between two and four teaching hours in English and further hours in their other subject. That leaves about thirty-four hours for single honours students and between sixteen and eighteen (on the English side) for joint-honours students to spend each week on independent study. It is down to you to draw up your own schedule of work. It is worth experimenting with a weekly timetable, although how you will map out the hours for different tasks is likely to vary greatly from week to week, especially with regard to the shifting ratios of reading time and writing time. The main thing is to set aside the allotted hours and try to keep to a routine. Aim for a work pattern of eight hours a day, five days a week (inclusive of teaching hours), or the equivalent spread over a week (though many find it beneficial to keep one day a week completely free from academic work). The pattern may be very flexible; you might aim to work two out of three sections of a day: morning and afternoon but not evening, morning and evening but not afternoon, and so forth. Take the time to work out what schedule best suits you. Trial and error might also be involved in establishing the best location for your studies; halls of residence tend to have quieter and noisier hours, and the library has its busy and less busy times. Many find that varying locations through the day, or from day to day, is conducive to happy studying. The other major adjustment university students of English have to make is to the requirement that they read, and move between, a wide range of literary and critical works relatively quickly; where, perhaps, students may have studied a single play of Shakespeare over a period of months, they will now be expected to study a play (or sometimes two) in a week – hence, of course, the need for so much independent study time. New students should be reassured that the adjustment is not as tough as it might at first seem. Don’t be dismayed if you find that your speed of reading and assimilation feels very slow at first. It will certainly improve, and probably quite dramatically, with experience. Mature students, in particular, can worry about feeling out of practice, but a few weeks should make all the difference. If you do find in general that your workload feels unreasonably heavy, or that you are having real difficulties managing your time, talk to your unit and/or personal tutor.
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INDEPENDENT STUDY: A CHECKLIST OF WEEKLY ACTIVITIES A combination of any or all of the activities in the list below will easily fill the thirty four hours or so that full-time students are expected to devote to private study each week. Where the requirements in one area are relatively light in a given week (for instance, in a lull between essay deadlines, or when the set text for a seminar or tutorial is one you have already read and prepared notes on), this is the week for moving ahead with other aspects of your studies, and for planning ahead to avoid undue pressures in due course. These, then, are the tasks you are expected to juggle and, as necessary, prioritize: Preparing for forthcoming seminars and tutorials; this will typically involve: (A) reading core texts and other required material (essays, handouts, etc); (B) taking notes and identifying key passages; (C) preparing talking points and questions for class discussion Preparing a seminar presentation (when required) Reading and planning in preparation for forthcoming essays Producing a first draft of an essay well in advance of the deadline Repeatedly revising and improving the essay before handing it in (probably two full days’ work after the completion of the draft) Conferring with tutors about forthcoming or recently marked essays (as required) Taking stock of a tutor’s comments on an essay: re-thinking ideas and phrases, re-writing sentences or passages to one’s own satisfaction, jotting notes to self about things to improve upon, and so forth; this may take a few hours per essay at first but the benefits to one’s writing and confidence should be significant. Reading (and re-reading, as often as necessary, relevant sections of) the Style Guide contained within this booklet and Diané Collinson et al, eds, Plain English, 2nd edn (Buckingham: Open University Press, 2001). Do not consider this reading as a brief, oneoff exercise: you need to invest as much time as is required to reach the point where you are confident that your prose is free from the various errors and impediments described in these works. Reading a range of supplementary material from course bibliographies Reading in preparation for or in the light of lectures Reading literature beyond the requirements of the teaching programme 3
KEY MATERIALS FOR REGULAR REFERENCE It would be a good idea to work with the following to hand, any or all of which you can expect to be consulting on a regular (and in some cases daily) basis: This booklet (in particular, for its Style Guide pages) The English department’s Undergraduate Handbook (and the Faculty of Arts Undergraduate Handbook) A good dictionary (e.g. the Concise Oxford or The Chambers Dictionary); you can also make use of the OED online from any university-networked PC: follow the links from the ‘Further Resources’ page of bristol.ac.uk/english/current-undergraduates/ A thesaurus (e.g. Roget’s Thesaurus) Stephen Greenblatt et al, eds, The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 8th edn, 2 vols (New York: Norton, 2006) Diané Collinson et al, eds, Plain English, 2nd edn (Buckingham: Open University Press, 2001) J. A. Cuddon, The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, 4th edn, ed. (London: Penguin, 2004), or a similar glossary of literary and critical terms Dinah Birch, ed., The Oxford Companion to English Literature, 7th edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), or Margaret Drabble, Jenny Stringer and Daniel Hahn, eds, The Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature, 3rd, rev. edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007)
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TAKING NOTES IN SEMINARS AND TUTORIALS Most note-taking should take place before, not during, a taught session: jot down your ideas and insights about the text or topic in question, and any points which you may wish to raise, and go over these jottings just prior to each class. It is not a good idea to take extensive notes during a tutorial or seminar (though you should always have pen and paper handy for catching occasional ideas or references). The purpose of these sessions is to generate a process of learning through debate and discussion and if you are too busy writing things down you won’t be able either to participate verbally or – equally important – to remain intellectually responsive through attentive listening. TAKING NOTES IN LECTURES Again, too much transcription will diminish the listening, and thus the learning, experience. Many students find that jotting down a summary of main points, plus some references and key words (and things to look up) is about right. An outline is more efficient than continuous prose: it shows relationships between points more clearly and is more helpful to go back to later. Between half a side and one side of a sheet of A4 is often the norm. You could always try formulating on paper the gist of a lecture in a few sentences, or your own elaboration of one particular idea that arose in the lecture and especially interested you, straight after the lecture has been given. Don’t feel you necessarily should be writing down something every minute during the lecture, or even every five minutes, and don’t worry about how much or little those around you seem to be scribbling. Remember that lectures are not, principally, for instruction (though some may contain elements of this); the benefit you take from them may reside as much (if not more) in the regular experience of listening to the elaboration of an argument (a skill you are here to develop for yourself) as in building up a file of notes. But some notes will clearly be handy – and you often won’t know at the time which page of lecture notes will later yield fruitful points of return. (For that reason, you should always record lecture titles and dates in your notes as a matter of course.) TAKING NOTES FROM BOOKS Always record your notes efficiently by heading them with the name of the author and/or editor, the title of the book or article, and the publication details: publisher, place, year (or journal title, volume number, year). You will need these details if in due course you reference this work in an essay. Also with an eye to future essays, be careful when taking notes that you always distinguish as clearly as possible between the ideas and words taken from the work in question and your own thoughts, reactions and comments (you could always initial the latter for clarity’s sake, or else keep them on a separate page from text-derived notes). You will find some critical books useful in their entirety, but many will be useful in part: an introduction, a specific chapter and/or material traced via the index might sometimes suffice. Some books or articles, even if useful or absorbing, may be too generalized (or tangential to your concerns) for much note-taking to be appropriate; others may be so eloquent that you feel the temptation to transcribe more than you really need; often, a brief summary of a work and a few representative quotations will be enough. If the work you are reading is a core literary text that you will be talking and/or writing about, be sure to jot down page references to key passages and insights that occur to you as you go along; there will often be insufficient time for a full re-read, especially of very long works. 5
GIVING A TUTORIAL OR SEMINAR PRESENTATION Students are often required to give brief presentations in seminars (and occasionally in one-hour tutorials). Individual tutors will advise as to what is expected for specific teaching sessions, but the general principle is that presentations are intended to initiate debate by raising issues, questions, and problems; they will often identify a particular passage (or passages) of the text (or texts) being discussed which the tutorial or seminar group might then go on to examine further. Bear in mind that a presentation is not supposed to be the final word on its designated subject. Feel free to be speculative, to call attention to things you don’t understand, to problems, puzzles and obscurities. Feel free also to make cross-references, if you think them fruitful, to other works by the writer you are talking about (a quotation from a letter, say, or a sentence from an essay), or to a brief quotation or phrase from literary criticism or theory, or to an especially relevant historical detail. Passing comparisons to texts studied earlier in the course might also be of use, as, on occasion, might a very brief handout for fellow students – although this often won’t be necessary. Try to avoid unduly summarizing what will already have been read and considered by the group ahead of the teaching session; you should seek to develop, illustrate or play with the ideas everyone has encountered in their reading, not simply restate them. A presentation should not be written out word for word beforehand, but should be improvised from notes and addressed to the group clearly (with a bit of eye contact, if possible) and at an appropriate speed. Don’t rush through it. But don’t exceed the stipulated time either; if a tutor asks for a five or ten minute presentation, you should be fairly sure beforehand that what you want to say will be delivered within the requested duration. Over-long presentations reduce group discussion time (a precious commodity) and can throw the tutor’s plan for what will be covered during the session as a whole. They also often attempt to take on more than is required. The prospect of giving a presentation often makes people nervous; the reality is generally not half as stressful as feared. Remember that you only need to speak for a few minutes, that others in your group will probably be nervous about presentations too (and thus will be with you in silent sympathy), that your role is simply to start the ball rolling, not to carry the burden of the session on behalf of your peers, and, above all, that you are NOT ON TRIAL! There is no expectation that you deliver a set-piece performance; you simply need to draw together, as clearly as possible, a few ideas and quotations (or references to textual moments) in order to provide prompts for further discussion. Remember also that you have probably done something like this already at school, and that the experience will be useful for future job situations that involve addressing a group of people. Those not giving a presentation should not feel the week’s duties have passed to another group member; indeed, a good way of preparing for any tutorial or seminar is to imagine what you would say, were you the presenter. As the presentation is given, listen out for correspondences between what is being said and what interests you in the text(s) under discussion. Does the presentation raise new questions or issues? Does anything in its contents alter your point of view, or clarify a previously grey area? How would you like to follow up on any of the issues being raised? Once the presentation has finished, chances are it will be over to you… 6
PLANNING AND WRITING ESSAYS The kind of essay which you produce at university should be much more developed and extended than your sixth-form or equivalent essays were, but it will probably take you some time to work up to this. This is why grades for first-year essays and exams do not count towards your degree mark; you have time to experiment, gain experience and benefit from feedback and guidance. There is no fixed structure with which the English essays you write at Bristol must comply, no single approach which must be adopted, and no uniform style in which essays must be written. Different strategies can quite legitimately be employed on different occasions, depending on the demands of the particular subject and the interests and intentions of the individual writer. Specific guidance on points of composition and referencing is provided in the Style Guide section of this booklet, but below is some generalized, NON-PRESCRIPTIVE advice about approaching the essay-writing task. Responding to Titles While some written assignments invite response to a set question (or one of a choice of questions), you will find that university essay titles often take the form of a statement by a critic which you are invited to discuss. You must understand and take up the terms of the statement, and follow through on its implications when analyzing specific features of the text or texts to which it refers, or is being made to refer. Keeping the title in mind is part of what gives an essay shape and direction: there needs to be a trajectory of thought that the reader can trace and stay with, even if there are complications in your elaboration of ideas. Sometimes this trajectory will be an ‘argument’ that advances claim X (and possibly also opposes it to claim Y), but sometimes the ‘argument’ (so-called) will be less obviously argumentative and more in the nature of an unfolding enquiry. This is fine, so long as the essay has an intelligible structure and sense of progression. You should regard every essay as an attempt to persuade your reader of a particular point of view (or way of reading), but that doesn’t mean that you have to be stridently for or against a title proposition or reductive in your approach. Sound critical thinking is often tentative or marked by ambivalence, and it is perfectly acceptable to take an ‘on the one hand … on the other’ approach to a given title, affirming its implications in certain respects while questioning them in others. The Planning Stage Suppose you have chosen (or been given) a particular essay title, that you have dwelt on its implications and started to think through its relevance to the texts (or texts) to which your essay will respond, and that you have read and taken relevant notes from both primary (that is, literary) and secondary (that is, critical, theoretical or contextual) works. At this point, you are not, of course, necessarily ready to begin writing; after all, a heap of notes is not, in itself, a plan. You might, at this stage, want to draw up a list of numbered points, perhaps with some key notes-toself and a central quotation (or more than one) attached to each. You need to move from a welter of ideas to a line of thought. This line will partly emerge through composition, but it 7
should also, up to a point, be traced out in advance. If it isn’t, you run two major risks: doubling back on yourself in the essay, and running out of space for points and examples you had hoped to include. Try to think of planning as a process of both accumulation and sifting. One often notes down more observations and quotations than an essay of a prescribed length will easily accommodate, and deciding what to leave out can often be as tricky as determining what to prioritize. Working on a PC can be helpful in this regard: using the cut and paste facility to move around your notes and play with the possible running order of paragraph points can help you make that allimportant leap from a bundle of ideas to a curve of thought. If you feel that too much transposing of material is going on, you may need to take a step back and consider repositioning the frames of your enquiry. Similarly, if you feel that too many quotations or ‘side issue’ points are crowding your notes, be discriminating and remove the surplus material. (You might shunt such material to the foot of your document or create a parallel file headed, say, ‘surplus.doc’; if your ideas change in due course, you can always move relegated notes back into the design.) Do not start writing the essay itself if your notes are still in a muddle. KEEP THE PLAN SIMPLE. And remember that you cannot say everything. The Writing Stage Be prepared to attempt two or three rough versions of your introduction, until you feel you are happy with the particular slant, or the well-phrased provisionality, of your opening remarks. Good introductions come in many forms, but are often relatively brief and to the point, without conveying a reductive or dogmatic response to the central proposition with which they are engaged; they are in touch with the implications of the title and identify the outlines of the territory one is about to chart. It is quite possible that the introduction may be both the first and the last paragraph you write, in that you may wish to revise some of your opening formulations in the light of what you find you have gone on to say, but the fact that an essay may, up to a point, discover its own direction in the act of composition is not a justification for putting off the writing of a draft introduction until the end: it is unlikely that you will be ready to develop a clear, coherent argument until you have formulated (however tentatively) an initial response to the subject in hand. Avoid the temptation to use page one of your essay to ‘warm up’. Resist in particular the sluggish ‘George Eliot was born in 1819’ kind of build-up. Also avoid plot summaries. You have a case to prove, or a line of thinking to develop, and you must not defer or distract from the task in hand. Contextual and/or historical facts must always earn their place in an essay of literary criticism. They should be drawn upon with discrimination at those points where the detail supplied enhances the persuasiveness of what you are asserting. KEEP IT RELEVANT! Every paragraph has a discrete amount of work to do, and often its central purpose will be clear from its opening sentence. At the very least, you should bear in mind that your reader will probably respond to this first sentence as an orientation point, so veering too abruptly away from it in what follows is liable to confuse. You may be familiar with the ‘state-quote-analyze’ model for a paragraph often touted in schools, and this does provide a helpful, if rudimentary, starting 8
point for thinking about the paragraph as a unit of thought that defines and develops a particular stage in an unfolding enquiry. But, of course, a reductive application of this model to one’s writing might lead to a pastry-cutter approach since different paragraphs often need to do different kinds of intellectual work. The key thing is to consider carefully the primary function of each paragraph in turn – in which regard you should avoid both the fragmentary, ‘unfulfilled’ and the rambling, ‘over-stuffed’ paragraph. Also, always ask yourself whether your breaks between one paragraph and the next are likely to seem arbitrary or well-judged to your reader. Quotations will, of course, provide important staging posts in the elaboration of your ‘argument’ or enquiry; in many paragraphs, your points will be supported by textual examples which will then be analysed in sufficient depth and detail to bring out the full force of the claims you are making – or the ideas you are pursuing. Take time (ideally at the planning stage) to choose exactly the right passages to illustrate your points. Make sure that you quote neither less nor more of each passage than you need; there is no virtue in copying out huge chunks of a text, and often a few words will make your point more effectively. Don’t leave your quotations to do all your argumentative work for you: they don’t necessarily speak for themselves and you will usually need to explore their significance in your own words – which doesn’t, of course, mean that you should inertly paraphrase what you have quoted. Your reader’s attention needs to be drawn to the particular features of the quotation (salient words or images, metrical, rhetorical or rhythmical effects, and so forth) which support and help you develop your line of reading. How to end an essay is often tricky. One danger is that the conclusion may come across as a stockpile of previously unmade (or under-developed) points. Another is that it may include excessive recycling of ideas already sufficiently expressed: there is quite a difference between striking a summarizing note and going back over well-trodden ground. Learning from the practice of critics you admire may prove particularly useful in suggesting alternative ways of rounding off an enquiry. And, as with introductions, experimenting with draft versions can pay great dividends here. In particular, a resonant and clarifying final sentence can often provide a satisfying sense of closure. Always aim to ‘touch the far side’ of an essay AT LEAST twenty-four hours before the deadline for submission (preferably earlier). You should then revise the work, re-reading it several times and with scrupulous attention. In part, you will be ‘proofing’ the work by checking for grammatical, punctuation or spelling errors; but you also need to attend to the fluency of the argument as a whole, and may find that you have to rephrase, cut or expand various formulations in order to enhance clarity. Above all, you must think of revision as an integral part of the composition process, rather than an optional extra stage. Indeed, the revising intelligence is central to your development as an essayist, as the following paragraph makes clear. After the Event Every essay you write can and should be better than the one before. You are more likely to achieve this goal by setting aside regular time for thinking specifically about composition: working through this booklet and Plain English, and going back over old essays. Build this activity in to your week-to-week timetable. It might be good practice to re-read each essay closely and in 9
full TWICE after it has been marked: once just after you have got it back and again just before you begin your next written assignment. This re-reading process ought to be constructive and pro-active, an exercise in heightening style-consciousness; be sure to identify and cross-question your own peculiar habits and tics as a writer, and to outstare those technical glitches currently impeding full fluency. In your first few re-reading experiences, you may well find that you need to pore over your work slowly, unpicking and recasting in your mind any unsatisfactory phrases; if your script is heavily annotated, it would help greatly to revise and edit the essay on screen, for your own benefit, in the light of the marker’s comments. (Obviously, the marker would not be able to look over, or take into consideration, such after-the-event revisions.) Rest assured, though, that you will pick up speed in this activity provided that you remain vigilant and are determined to detect and deal with your foibles. Clearly, the pay-off in terms of confidencegrowth can be considerable - and confidence itself (as we all know from our happiest writing experiences) can inspire fine and persuasive phrasing. PLAGIARISM, AND HOW TO AVOID IT This section is intended as an elucidatory supplement to, and not a substitute for, the entry on plagiarism in the English department’s Undergraduate Handbook. Please make sure you read (or reread) that section very carefully and then consider the following. It is your responsibility to ensure that you do not fall under any suspicion of plagiarism. Even when plagiarism is not a deliberate attempt at cheating – for example, if it is the result of careless note-taking – it will still be penalized. For this reason, you should always be careful, when taking notes from critical material, to record clearly when you are copying out passages from your source word-for-word, when you are summarizing the critic’s ideas in your own words, and when you are supplementing these ideas with your own observations and examples. If you are vigilant on this score, then avoiding the incorporation of unattributed or unacknowledged quotation or close paraphrase in your essays should not be difficult. Bear in mind that there is no literary criticism which is not, at some level or other, indebted to the ideas and arguments of others; indeed, some of the best criticism is formed explicitly as a response to another critic’s work. In your essays, you will find yourself wanting to make use of material which you have encountered in critical books and essays; this will include factual information, critical propositions and detailed remarks, and perhaps phrases which seem to you to encapsulate especially well (or poorly) a reading of a poem, novel or play. The crucial thing, once you have identified the critical material which looks useful, is to draw upon it without falling into the ‘plagiarism trap’. You must first distinguish between different kinds of indebtedness: crudely, these could be called indebtedness for information and indebtedness for ideas. A third variety of indebtedness is of a specifically verbal kind.
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Indebtedness for Information A good deal of information in literary studies is, essentially, held in common amongst all critics and students of the subject: you do not, ordinarily, have to acknowledge this. For example, you may not have known that T. S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land was published in 1922, but the critic you are reading mentions this. If you want to make use of the fact in your essay, there is no need to credit that critic specifically. Or again, the fact that John Keats wrote ‘Ode to Psyche’ as well as ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ is not the unique discovery of the critic of the Odes you have been reading. So, while certain areas of factual information may be unique to the critic (and such discoveries the rationale for his or her article or book being published), most factual information about literature is not anyone’s property and can go unreferenced. If you remain in doubt in any particular case, cite your source, and ask your tutor afterwards whether or not this was indeed appropriate. Indebtedness for Ideas Here, citation and acknowledgement are always required. When you want to quote from a critic, you must always acknowledge your source in a note. If you wish to condense and paraphrase what a critic says, again you must make it clear that this is what you are doing, either in the text of your essay or in a note. Some students express anxiety about how they are to make use of the ideas put before them in the course of lectures. If you are following a lecturer’s argument closely at a certain point in your essay, or if you are citing the same examples as used in the lecture, you should say so in a relevant note. You should also know when the lecturer is quoting or paraphrasing another critic (she or he will have said so in the lecture); if you are in any doubt, consult the lecturer in question. Verbal Indebtedness Very often, critics can provide you with phrases or sentences which you feel could be used effectively in the context of your own argument – either because they provide an idea which you can develop and illustrate in your own way or because you wish to take issue with a particular statement and define your own critical approach against it. Here, again, you must always acknowledge your source, and do so in every case of such quotation. It is not enough to cite the critic once if you have in fact made use of his or her words on several occasions in the essay; nor is it sufficient to put the critic’s book in your bibliography whilst failing to indicate the precise points where he or she was quoted in the essay. Remember that anybody’s words other than your own must ALWAYS appear within quotation marks, and the source must ALWAYS be given. Some examples: Below is a passage from Alastair Fowler, A History of English Literature (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987), pp. 50-51: The sonnet sequence in English derived ultimately from Dante’s La Vita Nuova and, more especially, from Petrarch’s Canzoniere. This great masterpiece haunted Europe with its metaphysical vision of love’s subjectivity as a hyperbolic, paradoxical state of contradicted being. […] 11
Typical Elizabethan sequences (and there are scores of them) consist of 100 or more sonnets, interspersed with other lyric genres – songs, in Astrophil and Stella. Often the array is rounded off with a long poem, such as Spenser’s ‘Epithalamion’ or Shakespeare’s ‘A Lover’s Complaint’, the whole forming a numerological pattern in imitation of Petrarch’s. If you were writing an essay on the sonnet, and you wished to make use of this passage, you might incorporate it like this: Italian works such as La Vita Nuova by Dante and the Canzoniere by Petrarch were strong influences on the English sonnet sequence. Alastair Fowler, who makes a case for the particular importance of Dante in this respect, has written of the ‘metaphysical vision of love’s subjectivity’ as 1 being central to this influence. In English sonnet sequences, songs and other forms of lyric can be mixed in with sonnets, while the sequences can be finished with a longer poem – as with the ‘Epithalamion’ which concludes Spenser’s Amoretti (1595), or the narrative poem ‘The Lover’s Complaint’, printed at the end of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (1609). Fowler sees also a tendency towards numerological patterning in English sequences, 2 which he claims imitates Petrarch’s practice. 1. Alastair Fowler, A History of English Literature (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987), p. 50. 2. Ibid, p. 51. [Advice on referencing conventions is given in the Style Guide later in this booklet.] Here, the indebtedness is acknowledged, both to specific verbal formulations and to ideas. The information incorporated is the ‘common’ information which does not need specific acknowledgement – but notice that the essay writer here makes that information a little more specific than it is in the Fowler, by supplying dates for the Spenser and the Shakespeare. Below is an example of a plagiarized version, where the Fowler is being passed off as the essay writer’s own work: English sonnet sequences are ultimately derived from Dante’s La Vita Nuova and Petrarch’s Canzoniere, a great masterpiece which had a metaphysical vision of the subjectivity of love: this was a hyperbolic and paradoxical state of contradicted being. There are scores of typical Elizabethan sequences, and they consist of more than 100 sonnets, interspersed with songs and lyric genres, as in Astrophil and Stella. Spenser rounds off the sequence with a long poem, such as his ‘Epithalamion’. In Shakespeare’s ‘The Lover’s Complaint’, the whole forms a numerological pattern in imitation of Petrarch’s. 12
Throughout this passage, the writer is either quoting Fowler or paraphrasing him very closely, and no acknowledgement of this is made. Even if Fowler’s book were to appear in the essay’s bibliography, this would be a clear case of plagiarism. And even if a footnote number were to be added after the closing word above and a reference given, it would not be sufficiently clear – as it is in the previous example – quite where the debt to Fowler begins and ends; this, too, is problematic and falls within the spectrum of practices considered plagiaristic. Note also how, in making small changes to and rearrangements of Fowler, the writer has garbled the source, with the result that what is written makes poor sense. The Importance of Originality You should not think that drawing upon literary criticism in your essays is governed solely by the need to avoid plagiarism or that, so long as you avoid plagiarism, you can be passive in your relation to the critics you read and cite. It is important that you should be able to think through critics’ ideas in your own terms and explore and develop them in your own idiom, rather than merely transmitting them (albeit with due acknowledgement) in your essay. Critical works do not contain the ‘answers’ to the kinds of literary problems your essays explore, but they can help you in bringing those problems into clearer focus. Good undergraduate writing does more than invoke critics as authorities who do the intellectual work for them: it engages with the ideas of others in order to sharpen its own perceptions and give an edge to its own arguments. Self-Plagiarism The English department will regard the re-use of your own essays (or even small sections of them) as ‘self-plagiarism’. While you may return to the same subjects or works in essays for different units, or within a unit, to avoid self-plagiarism you must not only avoid the verbatim or near-verbatim re-use of previously submitted essays in part or whole but also ensure that your return to the same subjects or works involves a rethinking of your ideas. Self-plagiarism is also a serious disciplinary matter. Plagiarism-Angst Finally, a few words of reassurance: some students worry initially that they may commit an act of plagiarism unintentionally; in fact, this is most unlikely, since good, normal critical practice, where sources are acknowledged as a matter of course, makes plagiarism very difficult. As a rule: if you’re worried that you might be in the ‘plagiarism trap’, even though you have acknowledged your sources, you are most unlikely to have anything to be concerned about.
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THE STYLE GUIDE (Revised Version, 2011) Introduction The Style Guide part of this booklet itemizes issues to do with grammar, punctuation, phrasing, and so forth, in order to help you achieve accurate and effective expression in your essays. Also included in these pages are detailed requirements for the correct use of quotations, and for the clear and consistent presentation of references and a bibliography. You should expect to consult this guide regularly, and you would do well to read it in its entirety as soon as possible (perhaps one section at a time, at different sittings). Some of the entries that follow will touch on unfamiliar matter, and these may take a little time to absorb and put into practice. Others may strike you as glaringly obvious, and their inclusion may come as a surprise. Every entry, though, has earned its place in the Style Guide: what follows is, essentially, a compilation by lecturers in the English department of errors and shortcomings found repeatedly in the essays they have marked. In this sense, former Bristol English students are, if not quite the authors, at least the unwitting commissioners of the guide! Obviously, there is much in the style and substance of an individual writer’s work that eludes generalization, and for which rules and recommendations are inappropriate. Your essay-markers will want to engage with this, and to comment on the intellectual content of your work, and not simply on the mechanics of its delivery and presentation (although it is vital to appreciate that content and expression are ultimately indissociable: a good idea in one’s head will not be such a good idea on the page if it is poorly delivered). The marker’s desire to engage with the distinctive concerns and characteristics of each essay is part of the point of issuing this Style Guide: it sets down in one place the various problems that occur in numerous essays – and it elaborates upon these in greater detail than could be managed, for reasons of time and space, in the margins of your work – so that markers can combine comments on matters specific to your argument with shorthand alerts to style problems, secure in the knowledge that the latter are glossed adequately here. Do remember that even copious annotation of your work may not be comprehensive and that, when taking stock of marked essays, you should be alert to other potential problems in your writing that the assessor may have only selectively identified in their comments. You can always supplement the written feedback you receive with additional notes-to-self, using the Style Guide as an aid in that process. In due course, you should, ideally, become your own best editor. But this will take time – and vigilance. The entries in this booklet are not all of the same order of importance and do not weigh equally heavily in the determination of an essay grade. The most significant entries are the ones to do with the clear and effective delivery of your ideas – in other words, basic writing skills. Others (to do with the finer points of formatting or referencing, for instance) spell out what may, at first, be unclear to you in terms of dominant scholarly conventions. These matters may not be as fundamental as the delivery of grammatically accurate, properly punctuated sentences; nonetheless, 14
you must appreciate that any lack of clarity or consistency in your work will prove distracting to the reader and take at least some attention away from the ideas you are advancing. The sooner you resolve points of confusion regarding the protocols of academic presentation, the sooner they will cease to feel burdensome. It is your responsibility to ensure that, as your writing develops, your essays conform to all the expectations and are free from all the errors and impediments described in this guide. This may seem a daunting prospect at the outset, but, as you read on, you will hopefully see that many of the issues covered are familiar to you already. The kinds of technical error to which essayists are usually prone are actually fairly few in number, and each essayist will most likely have her or his own personal profile of pitfalls: a small clutch of problems that recur from essay to essay. Even students who pride themselves on technical accuracy and an elegant prose style have flaws and blind spots; there will doubtless be entries in the guide that will help such students to improve further. Remember that most stylistic hang-ups, once confronted and comprehended, simply fall away – never to return. Remember also that taking care over the verbal framing of an idea is itself an intellectual process by which one refines and develops that very idea; time and again, you will discover that well-judged, technically sound phrasing has a tendency to lead you on to fresh insights as you write. Needless to say, the writing process becomes ever more pleasurable as result. Useful Supplements to this Guide You are strongly encouraged to purchase and work your way through Plain English, ed. by Diané Collinson et al, 2nd edn (Buckingham: Open University Press, 2001). It is also worth knowing about The MHRA Style Guide: A Handbook for Authors, Editors, And Writers of Theses, 2nd edn (London: Modern Humanities Research Association, 2008), on which the English department’s recommended conventions for the presentation of footnotes and bibliographies are based. (Note that the section on references in Plain English describes different conventions; to avoid confusion, this section is best overlooked.) The requirements for referencing texts according to the MHRA method are hopefully summarized adequately in the following pages, so chances are you won’t need to consult this publication often (if at all), but do turn to it if a point of scholarly presentation on which you are not clear arises. The MHRA’s booklet is available in the Arts and Social Sciences Library, and the latest version is accessible on the web at http://www.mhra.org.uk/Downloads/index.html. Also potentially useful are: Gordon Jarvie, Chambers Punctuation Guide (Edinburgh: Chambers, 1992) Gordon Taylor, The Student’s Writing Guide for the Arts and Social Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) R. L. Trask, Mind the Gaffe: The Penguin Guide to Common Errors in English (London: Penguin, 2002). WARNING: The grammar check facility on Microsoft Word is unreliable. It often suggests inappropriate changes to perfect prose and misses errors in imperfect prose. It should not be relied upon as a substitute for one’s own grammatical competence. If using this facility, proceed with great caution… 15
A: ESSAY FORMAT AND STRUCTURE A1. Format Requirements VERY IMPORTANT: Make sure that you follow the exact requirements for the formatting of all essays (spacing, margins, font size, lineation, and so forth) as described in the ‘Academic Guidance’ section of the English Undergraduate Handbook. See, specifically, the entry headed ‘Presentation and Layout of Work’. A2. Paragraphs A general account of the importance of effective paragraphing is given in the entry ‘The Writing Stage’ in the ‘Planning and Writing Essays’ section of this booklet. The points below provide a checklist of things you should bear in mind in order to make sure that your paragraphs are in good working order. a.) Indentations Make sure you indent the first line of each paragraph bar the first in your essay, so that it is absolutely clear where it begins. (This is preferable to leaving a blank line between paragraphs as some paragraphs begin at the start of a new page and thus might not be perceived as new.) Make sure also that you do not indent the first line of your prose underneath an inset quotation (see section E: QUOTATIONS below) – unless, of course, you intend to herald a new paragraph at this point. (In most cases, a new paragraph just here will probably be inappropriate, since one usually sets aside a chunk of text on the page in order to analyze, or at least provide some kind of follow-up response to the implications of, what has been quoted; it makes sense to include this commentary in the paragraph already in progress.) b.) Spacing Since your essay will be double-spaced, you do not need to leave an extra blank line between paragraphs. c.) Paragraph Control Have you started your paragraph with one particular point and then failed to follow this point through? Or does your paragraph lack a sense of direction from the outset? Is there a centre of gravity, or guiding principle, to the various observations contained within your paragraph? d.) The Over-Stuffed Paragraph Some paragraphs suffer from the attempt to juggle more ideas and examples than can be successfully integrated. Although there are no fixed rules on how long (or short) a paragraph should be, if it runs for significantly more than one A4 page of double-spaced prose, then there is a fair chance that it is trying to follow too many competing agendas. e.) The Broken or ‘Unfulfilled’ Paragraph Sometimes it can feel than an essayist has been trigger-happy with the carriage-return (or ‘Enter’) key, and that arbitrary breaks have been inserted during, rather than at the end of, the elaboration of a particular idea. At other times, a miniature paragraph can seem like a shard of prose 16
containing a disruptive side-point that could not be taken far but that the author simply did not want to leave out. In the latter case, the reader often senses that the essay might have been more persuasive and fluent without the digression. f.) Paragraph-to-Paragraph Relations Always ensure that paragraphs follow on from each other intelligibly; a new paragraph ought to assert a new point of emphasis but should also consolidate and carry forward what has come before, and not give the impression of having come out of nowhere. g.) Paragraph Endings As a general rule, avoid being over-reliant on critics to clinch your point and end your paragraph for you; there may be occasions on which it is appropriate and effective to round off the elaboration of an idea by quoting the words of others, but there is often something one can add to these words so that the paragraph comes to rest on one’s own point of view. Essays that repeatedly hand over the baton to other authors at the ends of paragraphs can seem unduly hedged-in by pre-existing opinions. B: PUNCTUATION Think of punctuation as a system of sign-posting that guides the reader through your sentences, separating the main point from asides and qualifications; if you put any of the signs in the wrong place, you will point the reader in the wrong direction. Of course, many issues to do with punctuation will be familiar to you already. However, you may also have niggling problems or unresolved dilemmas. This section lists many of the most commonly encountered instances of misleading punctuation in students’ essays. (Punctuation errors around quotations are glossed in section E: QUOTATIONS below.) B1. The Surplus Comma In some cases, the use of a comma may be optional and neither its presence nor its absence mars the sense. For instance, the preceding sentence could legitimately be re-punctuated as follows: In some cases the use of a comma may be optional, and neither its presence nor its absence mars the sense. What is at issue in these variants is simply the finessing of emphasis or tempo, at the author’s discretion, in the delivery of the constituent parts of the sentence. However, it is often the case that inserting a comma at a particular point within a sentence would be grammatically unsupportable and unintelligible. There should never be a comma, for example, between the subject and the main verb of a sentence unless they are separated by an additional clause or qualifier. WRONG: The amateur detective in Edmund Crispin’s novels, spends very little time on his day job. 17
RIGHT: The amateur detective in Edmund Crispin’s novels, Gervase Fen, spends very little time on his day job. RIGHT: The amateur detective in Edmund Crispin’s novels spends very little time on his day job. B2. The Missing Comma Never omit a comma where one is required to make the word relations within the sentence intelligible. Take the following example: Many critics have read Heart of Darkness as an assault on colonialist exploitation, but Chinua Achebe begs to differ with his judgment that Conrad was a racist. Can you see how the absence of a comma after ‘differ’ destabilizes the sense, generating an accidental (in this case, illogical) implication at odds with what is meant? B3. The Comma Splice Two discrete sentence constructions should almost never be spliced together by using a comma instead of a full stop. It is possible to cite exceptions – such as ‘You make the coffee, I’ll make the tea’ (technically, an example of ‘asyndeton’, a rhetorical figure which omits a grammatical conjunction) – but almost every instance of this surprisingly common and basic error in students’ essays is unsupportable because, unlike the example just cited, the comma is liable (however momentarily) to mislead. More than that, it risks giving the impression that the author does not know what a sentence is. WRONG: Adriana is jealous, she feels her husband is neglecting her. RIGHT: Adriana is jealous because she feels her husband is neglecting her. RIGHT: Adriana is jealous; she feels her husband is neglecting her. B4. The Non-Sentence Never leave a sentence construction grammatically incomplete. Sometimes non-sentences are a result of inattentiveness or grammatical confusion, but sometimes they are consciously deployed for a particular tonal effect. In the latter case, bear in mind that, although you may find sentence fragments (sentences, that is, without a main verb) in novels and journalistic writing, in literary criticism they can feel out of keeping, as if smuggled in from a different genre of writing. Consider the following example: Bradley Headstone provides an extreme – if complex – illustration of the fatally singleminded, obsessive lover. A danger to himself, and to others.
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The same point can be made in a number of grammatically supportable ways: Bradley Headstone provides an extreme – if complex – illustration of the fatally singleminded, obsessive lover; he is a danger to himself, and to others. A danger to himself, and to others, Bradley Headstone provides an extreme – if complex – illustration of the fatally single-minded, obsessive lover. Bradley Headstone, a danger to himself, and to others, provides an extreme – if complex – illustration of the fatally single-minded, obsessive lover. B5. The Run-on Sentence Two complete sentences cannot be run together without any punctuation. WRONG: They believe in Oedipus he is their king. These two statements should be separated by a full stop, or by a colon or semi-colon; alternatively, one sentence could be made dependent on the other through an explanatory clause, which might be introduced by because or who. RIGHT: They believe in Oedipus. He is their king. RIGHT: They believe in Oedipus; he is their king. RIGHT: They believe in Oedipus because he is their king. RIGHT: They believe in Oedipus, who is their king. B6. The Subordinate Clause Certain clauses within sentences function as asides, to be distinguished by commas from the main clause of the sentence. These are generally known as subordinate clauses, but are also sometimes termed dependent or embedded clauses. The terms are differently applied by different grammarians, but, for the sake of this entry, the basic principle is simple. Consider the following example: Paul Valéry’s words, with which Auden concurred, have a disquieting open-endedness. Note here how the commas, in effect, bracket the subordinate part of the sentence so that what surrounds them can be read as a fully free-standing sentence in its own right: Paul Valéry’s words have a disquieting open-endedness.
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On the same principle, be careful also to subordinate correctly such qualifying asides as ‘however’, ‘therefore’, ‘for example’, ‘then’ and ‘too’: Paul Valéry’s words, however, have a disquieting open-endedness. Paul Valéry’s words, therefore, have a disquieting open-endedness. Paul Valéry’s words, for example, have a disquieting open-endedness. Paul Valéry’s words, then, have a disquieting open-endedness. Paul Valéry’s words, too, have a disquieting open-endedness. To place a comma on one side of the qualifying word(s) and not the other is clearly wrong. B7. The Optional Subordinate Clause On some occasions, the use of commas to set up a subordinate clause may be optional – depending on whether or not there is a risk of obscuring the sense of the sentence by not putting down these markers. In such instances, you must choose between providing two commas or none at all. Be sure not to provide one and not the other, or you will skew the sense of your sentence. RIGHT: The joy they felt, on that first night, slowly withered into remorse. RIGHT: The joy they felt on that first night slowly withered into remorse. WRONG: The joy they felt on that first night, slowly withered into remorse. WRONG: The joy they felt, on that first night slowly withered into remorse. (Will they ever get over it?) B8. Punctuation around the Titles of Literary Works Be careful not to provide misleading punctuation when referring to an author’s work; for example, it would be wrong to write ‘In her novel, Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë observes…’. The additional clause which brackets off Jane Eyre from the surrounding words implies that Charlotte Brontë wrote one novel and that Jane Eyre was its title. In fact, she wrote four. Either of the following would be fine: ‘In her first novel, Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë observes…’ (the additional clause here identifies the title of that first novel) or (with no additional clause) ‘In her novel Jane Eyre Charlotte Brontë observes…’. (A comma after ‘Eyre’ would be optional in this case; neither its presence nor its absence would affect the sense.)
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B9. Punctuation around the Word ‘However’ The punctuation provided before and/or after the word ‘however’ is inaccurate in a surprisingly high percentage of cases. Only in certain circumstances should the word appear after a comma. This is an acceptable usage: Hennimore’s sentence makes sense, however you read it. In this instance, the ‘however’ clause properly qualifies the clause preceding it and cannot mislead the reader. The following, however, is an incorrect – because misleading – usage: Hennimore’s point begins intelligibly enough, however, as it develops, it begins to cause confusion. These are two discrete sentence constructions (see entry B3 above) and should be rendered thus: Hennimore’s point begins intelligibly enough. However, as it develops, it begins to cause confusion. (You may, alternatively, link the two sentence constructions here, since the one relates to the other so closely, by means of a semi-colon, rather than a full stop; see entry B10 below.) Consider also the differing implications of inserting or omitting a comma after the word ‘however’: a sentence beginning ‘However one reads...’ is not at all the same as one beginning ‘However, one reads…’. In the former, the whole opening phrase is being offered as a qualifying remark to what will follow (and can be paraphrased as ‘In whatever way one reads…’); in the latter, the word ‘however’ acts as a qualifier by itself. Be sure which usage you intend and avoid forcing the reader to do a double-take. B10. The Semi-Colon and Colon Many people use one of these when the other would be more appropriate, or employ one or both in ways that are at odds with how the punctuation marks are commonly understood to function. It must be admitted that there are some varying conventions and opinions regarding their usage in specific types of grammatical construction, but this small degree of divergent thinking in relatively uncommon cases does not mean that correct versus incorrect usage is not easy to establish in the vast majority of cases. As a general rule, when choosing between the two punctuation points, it may be helpful to think of the semi-colon as a way of identifying two semi-detached but related sentences, and of the colon as a way of identifying the content of sentence two as the illustration of, or direct follow-up to, the content of sentence one. a.) The Semi-Colon Except when they are used to separate items in list, semi-colons function to mark the end of a complete grammatical sentence – though in a less final way than full stops. The choice of a semicolon indicates that the two sentences are closely linked, and that the writer wants them to be 21
considered together. The thoughts contained in them are grammatically independent, but logically dependent on each other, as in the following examples: In the first draft, Plath wrote ‘husband’; in the second, she wrote ‘bastard’. I am not trying to be provocative; I am merely trying to explain. Notice how in both examples the points the sentences make are more interdependent than a full stop would have suggested. Sometimes the linking semi-colon may be accompanied by a conjunctive adverb such as ‘therefore’, ‘however’ or ‘besides’. The auditorium was full; however, she was able to watch from the wings. Semi-colons should never be employed to introduce quotations, nor should they be used hazily as comma variants. WRONG: Chaucer relied on the works of Boethius; although he did not always think like Boethius. RIGHT: Chaucer relied on the works of Boethius, although he did not always think like Boethius. b) The Colon The colon is an introductory punctuation mark: it heralds something. Like the semi-colon, it comes at the end of a fully free-standing sentence construction, but what it introduces is not always another complete sentence. Its presence points forward to further explanatory information, which may come in the form of a word or phrase, a sentence, a list, or a quotation (but the last of these only in certain instances, as entry E7 below makes clear). It should only be used to link sentences if the latter reads as a corollary of the former. The poem enacts the very process it describes: it collapses into fragments. You will need to bring the following: a cricket bat, a cane umbrella, a spy-glass, a revolver, and a clean pair of driving gloves. Ilsa’s presence in Casablanca could mean only one thing: trouble. Normally a sentence should not contain more than one colon.
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B11. The Apostrophe Apostrophes have two major functions: i.) They indicate that one or more letters have been omitted: for example, ‘can’t’, ‘o’er’. In critical essays you should avoid informal abbreviations such as ‘can’t’, ‘won’t’, ‘didn’t’, and so forth (except in quotations, of course). ii.) They indicate possession. The apostrophe is placed before the final s in singular nouns: Shakespeare’s, Eliot’s. It is placed after the final s in plural nouns: the Romantics’ morbidity, the Georgians’ wistful nostalgia. When the plural form of the noun does not have a final s, the apostrophe is placed before the possessive s – as in the case of ‘children’s books’ or ‘people’s rights’. When a noun or proper name ends in s, it still takes ’s in the possessive form: Keats’s odes; Jones’s argument; the princess’s refusal. However, it is usual to omit the final s in proper names that are Latin or Greek in form, although the apostrophe is still necessary: Aeneas’ story; Odysseus’ cunning; Aristophanes’ comedies. In hyphenated words, only the final word takes the apostrophe to form the possessive: ‘the mother-in-law’s jealousy’. B12. The Apostrophe and Decades Apostrophes should not be used in the numerical description of decades: one should refer to the 1930s, not the 1930’s. With nothing to abbreviate, and no call for a possessive, the use of an apostrophe in such an instance is unwarranted. B13. Its and It’s, Whose and Who’s There is a great deal of unnecessary confusion over the difference between its and it’s. Without an apostrophe, its is the possessive form of it; this is the exception that proves the rule about the use of apostrophes to indicate possession. With an apostrophe, it’s is the abbreviated form of it is. The form its’ does not exist. Similarly, whose is the possessive form of who; who’s is the abbreviated form of who is. The form whos’ does not exist either. Possessive pronouns such as hers and ours do not take apostrophes. B14. The Dash Dashes need to be distinguished from hyphens. A hyphen links two words together as a ‘compound’ word (for example, alter-ego), with no character spaces around the hyphen. Dashes do require a character space on either side (this immediately visually distinguishes them from hyphens) and are used to indicate which part of the sentence in which they occur functions as either a supplement or an aside. The single dash can be used as an alternative to a colon, but it can strike a more abrupt or informal note, and so may have the effect of conveying a spontaneous afterthought. That speech changes our conception of the character – she seems much stronger. We expect the hero to make a fatal mistake – and indeed he does. Two dashes can be used to mark an interruption or digression, as you might use brackets or a pair of commas. 23
It is startling to hear the chief business of so many romances – seeking honour in arms – dismissed in a single couplet. You should not use dashes as a regular alternative to brackets or commas. Too many of them in quick succession can impart a jerky, idiosyncratic quality to one’s prose. B15. The Exclamation Mark These should be used with great caution. They tend to suggest that the writer is over-excited, or that the reader needs help in understanding the point being made. B16. Brackets and Punctuation When providing full sentences inside brackets put the full-stop before the closing bracket. Note also that commas should never appear before opening brackets; this applies to the presentation of bibliographical details, as described in F2(c). C: WORD ORDER AND WORD RELATIONS This section highlights various cases of grammatically flawed and/or inadvertently misleading relations between parts of a sentence. If words do not connect with each other in the way that was intended, then, even if the reader can work out what you meant to say, the sense will still be compromised. C1. Confusing Word Order Be sure not to arrange the constituent parts of your sentence in such a way as to confuse. Consider, for example, the difference between these two sentences (neither of which is grammatically wrong, but one of which is grammatically misleading): Poe writes in sensationalist terms of the horror of being buried alive. Poe writes of the horror of being buried alive in sensationalist terms. Note also the following distinction: WRONG: In Primo Levi’s poem ‘The Opus’, he writes … RIGHT: In his poem ‘The Opus’, Primo Levi writes … Awkwardness can also arise when handling bracketed asides: AWKWARD: From the Wife of Bath’s (the older woman’s) point of view … CLEAR: From the point of view of the Wife of Bath (the older woman) …
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C2. Unintentional Ambiguity Accidental double-meanings sometimes creep into one’s writing, as in this case: While both authors express their views in different ways… This has two possible meanings, forcing the reader to guess whether you are referring to a difference between the two authors’ views or to the fact that each author independently conveys more than one point of view. Rephrasing will clarify the point: While the two authors differ in the way in which they express their views… There are many ways of accidentally misleading the reader by activating two (or more) implications where only one was intended. If, for example, you were to write the sentence ‘Her poem contemplates the dreadful violation of the Holocaust’, you may mean simply to convey the sense that the victims of the Holocaust suffered a dreadful violation and that the author’s poem meditates upon this, but your choice of wording would also bring in a confusing, alternative implication (that the Holocaust itself was subject to a dreadful violation); just because the reader could probably determine the point you intended from the context in which this sentence occurs, you should not have forced her or him to puzzle over the inadvertent ambiguity. (In this case, the reader might have wondered if you had in mind misrepresentations, or even denials, of the Holocaust – ‘violations’ of a different kind – but the form of wording you chose might have left them unsure.) C3. Misattribution of Terms Be careful not to attribute the qualities of one thing to another inappropriately. WRONG: Unlike the portrait of the Wife of Bath, Rosalind is the embodiment of youth and beauty. The comparison of the person with the portrait is clumsy, and slightly to one side of the intended meaning. RIGHT: Unlike the Wife of Bath, Rosalind is the embodiment of youth and beauty. C4. Losing Sense within a Sentence Sometimes sentences lose sight of, or just slightly let slip, the point they originally set out to make. In many such cases, they fall prey to what is technically called ‘anacoluthon’, a term used to describe the passing from one grammatical construction to another before the former is completed. An example: If it were not for the penetration of daylight, the Count had certainly drunk his fill. Presumably, one of these two alternatives was intended (but the instance of anacoluthon does not make clear which): 25
If it were not for the penetration of daylight, the Count would have carried on drinking. By the time daylight had penetrated, the Count had certainly drunk his fill. C5. Unattached Participles a.) The Dangling Participle This problem arises when the first phrase of a sentence contains a participle form of a verb (often marked by the ending –ing, –ed or -en) that one expects to see applied to a particular subject, only for the next part of the sentence to apply the verb inappropriately to a different subject, as in this example: Fearfully awaiting his death sentence, Dickens accords Fagin a new level of sympathy. It is Fagin, not Dickens, who faces the prospect of execution, and yet the grammatical structure of the sentence suggests otherwise: the word ‘awaiting’ – the present participle of the verb ‘to await’ – is left ‘dangling’ because it is not grammatically linked to the noun (‘Fagin’) to which it belongs. It is not just confusion between author and character that leaves participles dangling. The intrusion of the reader into a sentence often serves the same effect: In concealing the green girdle we see Gawain’s deceitfulness. It is not we who are concealing the girdle, but Gawain. He is the implied subject of the first clause, and so the reader expects him to be the subject of the main clause too. Either of these would do: In concealing the green girdle Gawain shows his deceitfulness. When Gawain conceals the green girdle, we see his deceitfulness. b.) Other Unattached Participles Sometimes a participle in the final clause or phrase of a sentence is not properly connected to the preceding matter: Jane Eyre resists Rochester’s advances, reflecting the dictates of convention. Here, the participle ‘reflecting’ is not intelligibly governed by any earlier word in the sentence. There is an inaccurate, quasi-linkage of ‘Jane Eyre’ and the participle, but it is not Jane herself who reflects the dictates; rather, it is what she does. An accurate version of the sentence, then, might read: Jane Eyre resists Rochester’s advances, her actions reflecting the dictates of convention.
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C6. Two-Part Formulae You should pay attention to the ways in which certain words or phrases govern certain respective parts of your sentence. Problems can occur, for instance, with expressions containing the words ‘not only ... but also’, ‘both ... and’, ‘either … or’, ‘between ... and’, ‘On the one hand ... On the other’, ‘just as … so’. Make sure that you accurately complete the construction you have begun, and that you place the second part of the two-part formula in exactly the right place. D: ERRORS, DANGERS AND GREY AREAS This section is something of a miscellany. Its entries are arranged alphabetically rather than in defined clusters as the points they cover elude neat categorization. Each entry identifies a characteristic writing tendency found repeatedly in student essays or highlights a compositional issue deserving further thought. In some cases, the matter is not necessarily one of right versus wrong usage; certain entries are more ‘reflective’, aiming to describe a particular quirk or writing habit that can impede fluent and effective expression. D1. Abbreviations Scholarly convention dictates that it is preferable to avoid abbreviations such as ‘e.g.’, ‘i.e.’, and ‘etc’ in academic writing and that the phrases ‘for example’, ‘that is’, and ‘and so forth’ are more appropriate. In general, you should shun abbreviations as far as possible in the main body of your prose (although the use of ‘p.’ for ‘page’, ‘pp.’ for pages’, ‘l.’ for ‘line’ and ‘ll.’ for ‘lines’, as used in footnotes, is also generally used in bracketed references within the essay itself: see section F: REFERENCES AND FOOTNOTES below). You should also avoid shortening ‘cannot’ to ‘can’t’, ‘I will’ to ‘I’ll’, ‘first’ to ‘1st’, ‘one’ to ‘1’ (again, unless you are providing a bracketed page or line number), ‘nineteenth century’ to ‘19th century’, and so forth. D2. Alliteration, Assonance and Sibilance It is commonplace, and at times effective, to draw the reader’s attention to alliteration, assonance and/or sibilance in a literary text under discussion (especially a poem). By all means do this where you feel it will enhance the persuasiveness of your commentary, but avoid doing it on auto-pilot. Above all, make sure you guard against being either vague or strained in the way you draw attention to such effects. Here are two unconvincing examples from former student essays: VAGUE: ‘The poet uses many v and p sounds in order to emphasize their point.’ STRAINED: ‘The appearance of the letter “s” three times in one line and the letter “p” twice shows that the poet is spitting out her anger like a venomous snake.’ If in doubt, avoid making a point about the recurrence of a vowel or consonant; not all such recurrences are equally expressive or significant. D3. Authors’ Names The first time you mention an author (including a critic) in an essay, give her or his full published name; in subsequent references to the same writer this can be shortened to just the surname. There is no need to put the word ‘critic’ before a critic’s name (as in ‘Critic Helen Vendler argues…’); this strikes an odd note. Also, do not substitute initials for the forenames of authors, 27
unless their published work is thus identified (as in the cases of T. S. Eliot or V. S. Naipaul, for example); this point holds true for the footnotes and bibliography too. D4. Auto-Repeat Be careful not to re-use a particular word or phrase in a way that seems inert or unduly repetitious. It is easy to develop rhetorical tics, and important to appreciate how over-reliance on certain phrases can give a static effect to your prose. Sometimes words recur from sentence to sentence due to unconscious replay and sometimes the key words of a title can be reiterated too frequently, as if trotted out by rote. Vigilant revising and occasional recourse to a thesaurus should mitigate these problems. D5. Dictionary Definitions It is, of course, important to consult a dictionary regularly in order to be sure of your understanding and handling of certain words; moreover, there may be times when exploiting the etymology of a term within your essay will help you to further a critical idea. However, there are occasions on which wheeling out dictionary definitions can be redundant, creaky and a little wearying for the reader (and, one suspects, for the writer); this can be true, for instance, of an essay introduction that relies on a ‘Before considering X, it is first necessary to define A, B and C’ kind of approach. Be discriminating, and don’t just trundle out dictionary definitions as a default essay-writing mannerism: it can seem dutiful and laborious, rather than resourceful. D6. Different Words, Similar Spellings The following are pairs of words which are frequently not distinguished correctly. Make sure that you know the difference in each case. allude/elude climactic/climatic complementary/complimentary contemporary/contemporaneous council/counsel dependant/dependent discreet/discrete disinterested/uninterested loath (or loth)/loathe naught/nought practice/practise precede/proceed principal/principle prophecy/prophesy stationary/stationery D7. The First Person Singular Pronoun There is no law against using ‘I’ in an essay, and there may be occasions on which it will be effective or necessary. However, there are also many occasions on which it works less well. It depends on the 28
context, but to say, for instance, ‘I think’ or ‘I would argue that’ can come across as either overemphatic or unduly provisional. There might also be a ‘scripted speech’ feel to such moments in an essay, and this can seem somewhat at odds with the remainder of your prose. Furthermore, it might strike the reader as unaccountable why certain claims have such phrases attached to them while others do not. Consider the following, copied across (with slight revisions) from an old version of the English Undergraduate Handbook: Students sometimes ask, ‘Can we use the first person in our essays? To what extent do you want us to express our personal opinions?’ These questions are more complicated than they first seem, as they involve more than mere stylistic propriety. A brief answer to them would go something like this: ‘When you are writing an essay, whether you use “I” or not, you are by default inviting your reader to share your interpretation of a text. You are registering your own impressions of that text in the hope that your thoughts will, in some sense (although maybe not completely and maybe not immediately) strike a sympathetic chord in your reader’s experience. In this, you are tacitly assuming that your reading of the text, while being in one important sense personal and individual (since no one else can read the poem or play or novel for you), is not merely personal or idiosyncratic. You are not, that is, putting forward your ideas in a defiantly take-it-or-leave-it spirit: “Well, that is what I think the poem is about; I do not, of course, expect you to agree; nor am I going to be persuaded by you to change my mind, whatever you say, and however good your arguments are.” The implicit “offer” goes more like this: “This is how I read the poem, and these are the features of the text that seem to me to support such a reading. Do you agree?”’ In the light of this, you would be advised to restrict your use of such phrases as ‘I think’ or ‘in my opinion’ to those (probably relatively rare) moments in your essay where, either defiantly or tentatively, you realize that you are ‘going out on a limb’ and saying something with which you recognize your readers are not likely to agree immediately. You can take it as read that, in one sense, the whole essay is ‘your opinion’, in the ways described above. But it is useful to differentiate between those moments where you think you have a good chance of persuading people and those where (for whatever reason) you think your ideas might meet with some resistance and/or may be off-target. D8. Gender-Neutral Language In recent times it has become acceptable (and to many desirable) to challenge the assumption that the notional reader of a text, or else an anonymous author, is male. For example, instead of using a masculine pronoun when making generalizations that apply equally to women, such as ‘the reader may find that this contradicts his expectations’, one might choose to say ‘the reader may find that this contradicts his or her expectations’, or ‘the reader may find that this contradicts her or his expectations’, or ‘readers may find that this contradicts their expectations’. (It is often possible to rewrite the sentence so as to avoid such pronouns altogether.) You may also find some critics alternating, over the course of an essay, between ‘she’ and ‘he’, and ‘him’ and ‘her’, with each successive reference to an anonymous figure; others again deliberately replace the traditional ‘he’ and ‘him’ with ‘she’ and ‘her’ as a revisionist gesture. It is up to you to decide what seems preferable on this matter and to ‘gender’ your language accordingly.
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D9. Generalization Be on guard against the danger of generalization beyond the call of duty. Try to avoid observations that are so hazy or bland as to be non-illuminating (as in ‘The portrayal of the characters tells us much about them as people’) and make sure that you don’t tread water in your essays by simply recounting plot details or offering a ‘potted history’; such commentary will not help you trace the main thread of your enquiry. Always ask yourself which, if any, of the details you are considering are precisely relevant to the key point you are pursuing. Do not risk sacrificing detailed textual analysis to the reiteration of bare facts or to the espousal of unhelpfully broad opinions. Over-generalized commentary often occurs when the essayist assumes the role of cultural historian. Of course, sometimes you will quite properly want to locate the discussion of a literary work in a particular historical context, but, when doing this, you must ensure that you avoid travesty-descriptions of events or periods. At times, when literature students attempt to write about history, they indulge in vacuous generalizations of the ‘in the seventeenth century all men were preoccupied with the idea of death’, ‘the eighteenth century was the age of reason’ or ‘the Victorian Age is characterized by prudery and self denial’ variety. Be as specific as possible about the particular historical facts, events or ideas which are relevant to your point, and make sure that you have got them right. Do not affect historical knowledge which you do not possess. Consider citing specific historians’ findings rather than offering historical summations off your own bat; the latter nearly always come over as unintentional comedy of the 1066 and All That variety. D10. Loose Colloquialism Some phrases in an essay can provide a disruptive shift in idiom by slipping into more conversational (and often also clichéd) language than that characterizing the rest of the essay. (Examples from past student essays include ‘what with science and medicine being all around us…’ and ‘Hamlet’s whole world just comes tumbling down’.) It can also be jarring when an essay has ‘outside of’ for ‘outside’, ‘inside of’ for ‘inside’, ‘try and explain’ for ‘try to explain’, and so forth; again, the jarring effect comes from the sense that the essay is slipping and sliding between a casual ‘spoken’ idiom and a careful, accurate linguistic exercise. D11. Mechanical Phrasing There are certain phrases (among them ‘In this essay I will explore’, ‘It is now necessary to consider’, ‘I have attempted to show’, ‘As explained above’, ‘In conclusion’, and so forth) that are not wrong per se, but, if using them, you should be aware of the attendant risk of sounding rather mechanical. These phrases belong to a generic, ‘going-through-the-motions’ kind of ‘essay-speak’ and can have the effect of muting the individual critical voice you should be trying to cultivate. Avoid creaking machinery! Avoid also ponderous, stilted or unduly wordy formulations, a relatively extreme example of which can be supplied here from a past student essay: ‘In attempting to address the issue of [X], the consideration of [Y] would undoubtedly be most helpful. I will therefore address this point in the following sentences.’ This does rather sound like the prose of someone waiting for inspiration to arrive!
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D12. Missing Words Some writers have a tendency to omit one or more words from certain sentences. This could arise from the nature (and, in some cases, speed) of composition. Vigilant revision should help here; reading one’s own work aloud is particularly useful for spotting accidental omissions that one fails to detect simply by scanning the page. D13. Misuse of Words Be careful not to misapprehend the meaning of a particular word or employ it in an inappropriate context. Verbs can sometimes be tricky, especially when a transitive one is handled intransitively, or vice versa. ‘To achieve’, for example, is a transitive verb: that is, it governs a direct object. One achieves a goal. ‘To triumph’, on the other hand, is intransitive: there is no direct object. One does not ‘triumph a goal’; one simply triumphs. Beware also of the following ‘danger words’ as they are often misused: a.) ‘Affect’ and ‘Effect’ ‘To affect’ is not ‘to effect’; nor is an ‘effect’ an ‘affect’! Check the OED and make sure you use these words (in either their verb or noun form) accurately. b.) ‘However’ Always be sure that that there is a clear enough distinction to the preceding point when employing this word; it is often used when there is an insufficient ‘However….’ logic to support it. Also, try to avoid using a ‘however’ clause after a ‘but…’ clause (or vice versa); two ‘contradiction’ clauses in a row can be inelegant and sometimes confusing. See also B9 regarding correct and incorrect punctuation around the word ‘However’. c.) ‘Infer’ and ‘Imply’ The verb ‘to infer’ is commonly misused as a variant for the verb ‘to imply’. An author (or text) implies; a reader infers from the implications of the author (or text). d.) ‘Juxtapose’/‘Juxtaposition’ In literary criticism, the attention paid to juxtaposition (that is, the placing of two or more words or phrases alongside each other) tends to identify the way in which notable contrasts or connections are generated or ideas are played off against each other; often this results from a collision of either seemingly unrelated or unexpectedly cognate images. (Consider, for example, the striking juxtaposition of images in Ezra Pound’s famous haiku ‘In a Station of the Metro’: ‘The apparition of these faces in the crowd; / Petals on a wet, black bough.’) In student essays, the words ‘juxtapose’ and ‘juxtaposition’ are often used loosely and at times inaccurately. e.) ‘Literally’ Many people write or say ‘literally’ when, in fact, they mean ‘to a great extent’; they also often compound the vice by using ‘figurative’ – in other words, non-literal – terms of description. (If somebody tells you they were ‘like, literally bowled over’, remember to ask them when they first 31
became a human skittle. Then rebuke them smartly for heralding their proclaimed literalism with a (‘like’) simile. Savour the moment.) f.) ‘Paradox’ Often the term ‘paradox’ is incorrectly employed to describe a discrepancy or contrast between one thing and another. A paradox should be understood as a statement, proposition or description which contains an apparent self-contradiction but which sustains analysis and turns out to be wellfounded. The OED provides an example from the journal Essays in Criticism: ‘The paradox that spontaneity of expression demanded premeditated art was well understood’. g.) ‘So’ The use of ‘so’ as a synonym for ‘thus’ or ‘therefore’ (or, more generally, as a loose connective between one point and another) can strike the reader as inappropriately slack, breezy or colloquial. Consider this sentence: ‘So, Virginia Woolf must have been depressed’. Although the whole formulation is facile, note how the little word ‘so’ makes a particularly acute contribution to that effect. h.) ‘Such’ and ‘Like’ ‘We see this preoccupation in writers such as Shakespeare, Keats and Martin Amis’: this odd conflation of authors is clearly problematic. Perhaps less obviously, reference to ‘a writer like Mary Shelley’ is questionable, for it implies that there are other writers who can easily be substituted for the one mentioned. i.) ‘Thus’ and ‘Therefore’ Be precise and, if necessary, sparing in your use of these words; they can become verbal tics and be used too glibly. Sometimes the follow-on statements they herald turn out not to be clear corollaries after all. D14. Non-Words Always make sure that the words you use actually exist! Keep a bookmark on the OED online (or keep a printed dictionary to hand), and get into the habit of double-checking that the word you are reaching for is not actually beyond reach! You might be surprised how many strange and deformed neologisms lurk in the marker’s essay pile… D15. Odd Alliances Sometimes two or more words are forced to sit oddly alongside, or in relation to, each other. Consider, for example, the phrase ‘floral imagery resonates through the stanza and is redolent of spring’, where visual, aural and olfactory terms of description are inadvertently conflated. Mixed metaphors are also a risk; take care not to muddle your terms of description, especially when handling figurative language.
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D16. Overlong Sentences Watch out for sentences that are loaded with more material (either grammatical or intellectual) than they can carry comfortably. Consider how your point (or points) might be measured out more effectively in two or more discrete sentences. D17. Passivity Some words and forms of phrasing in essays can come across as inadvertently passive in the face of their subject. For example, references to ‘amazingly powerful verse’ or ‘a timeless masterpiece’ not only are derivative but also replace analytical sharpness with abject admiration; in addition, the subjective note they strike might be at odds with the spirit of critical objectivity in which the argument of one’s essay is more generally being pursued. Similarly, a phrase such as ‘This sums up perfectly’ (perhaps more common in the seminar room than on the page) denies subtlety or complication in one’s response to the effects of a literary or critical quotation. Other adverbs best shunned are ‘incredibly’ and ‘interestingly’: avoid special pleading and let the interest value or impressiveness of your point speak for itself. D18. Prepositions at the Ends of Sentences There is a prevailing convention that it is best not to end a sentence with a preposition (that is, a word such as ‘on’, ‘with’, ‘to’, and so forth). Disfavoured: This is the very point which Elizabeth Bishop’s poem alludes to. Favoured: This is the very point to which Elizabeth Bishop’s poem alludes. Strictly speaking, the issue at stake here is a matter not of right versus wrong usage (after all, the sense of the sentence is not in question in the ‘disfavoured’ case) but rather of style preference among many writers. D19. Scattergun Delivery Discontinuity of thought can mar an essay significantly, even if the ideas are sound. You must strive to avoid airing several ideas in quick succession without elaborating upon each sufficiently or making clear their relevance to each other, or to the essay as a whole. In particular, you should avoid making confusing leaps in logic in the progression from one sentence to the next. Always ensure that there is fluency in the ordering of your observations. D20. Slippage between Singular and Plural Be careful not to slip between the singular and the plural in confusing ways (for example, by describing the experience of ‘the reader’ in one clause and then using ‘we’ in the next). And always remember to use a plural form of the verb when there are two or more subjects. WRONG: Tight organisation and control is necessary for a good essay.
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Be careful also to distinguish between the singular and plural forms of certain nouns; the following are often confused or misused: criterion/criteria; formula/formulae; medium/media; persona/personae; phenomenon/phenomena; tableau/tableaux. D21. Spelling Errors Always remember to use the spell-check facility on your computer, but remember also that this will never be sufficient in itself; for example, the computer cannot know whether you meant to write ‘their’, ‘they’re’ or ‘there’, nor will it spot your mistake if, for example, you wrote ‘form’ when you meant to write ‘from’, or ‘sage’ when you meant to write ‘saga’ (or ‘usage’). Confusions between American and English spelling conventions may also arise from the use of technology. Vigilant proofing of your work – in addition to use of the spell-check facility – is crucial for picking up any inadvertent errors of this kind. (NB: American students writing essays at Bristol, and any others who have been mainly educated using another spelling system, should feel free to use the spelling conventions of their native country.) D22. Split Infinitives Convention dictates that verbs should not be separated from their governing preposition ‘to’; thus, for example, ‘to boldly go where no man has gone before’ ought properly read ‘to go boldly where no man has gone before’. The validity of this convention is in dispute but it is worth knowing about. D23. Syntactical Control Avoid needlessly laborious syntactical constructions. These may mar the fluency and delay and/or obscure the sense of what you are saying. D24. Tense and Plot In general, you should use the present tense for plot summary and commentary on the plot: ‘At this point the hero makes a mistake’. However, you may need to use the past tense where a chronological sequence is involved: ‘When the misunderstandings have been cleared up, the lovers can marry’. D25. Tense: Shifts and Oddities Take care not to slip from one tense to another in a confusing or incorrect way. This often happens when moving between the tense of one’s critical commentary and the tense of a quotation inserted into the commentary; careful rewording usually provides a way out of this problem. You should also avoid choices of tense that strike an odd note; why write, for instance, ‘the poem is conveying a mood of sad bewilderment’ instead of ‘the poem conveys a mood of sad bewilderment’? D26. Themes We are all used to writing and reading about the ‘themes’ of literary works and, of course, there is nothing wrong with characterizing texts in terms of the dominant ideas they communicate. Nonetheless, there are risks of making works seem more programmatic and reductive than they may actually be; there is quite a difference, for instance, between claiming, in reference to a particular 34
poem, that ‘the third stanza deals with the theme of suicide’ and observing that ‘the third stanza alludes indirectly, almost tentatively, to the prospect of suicide’. Rather than stating that a certain work ‘deals with’ or ‘responds to the theme of’ X, it might often be more appropriate to write of how the text, for example, ‘reveals a preoccupation with’, ‘transmits ideas concerning’, or ‘expresses contradictory views on the matter of’ X. There are no preferred formulae or forbidden terms here, and the word ‘theme’ itself is by no means off-limits; this entry is simply an invitation for you to exercise discrimination in your choice of phrasing when discussing what ideas a literary work considers or conveys. In this connection, you might wish to mull over the poet Geoffrey Hill’s response, in interview, to the question ‘Would you resent the criticism that you address yourself to subjects in an ambiguous way?’: ‘I query the idea that I “address myself to subjects”, which seems to imply some kind of settled policy. It may be that the subjects present themselves to me as being full of ambiguous implications, but this is surely a different matter. The ambiguities and scruples seem to reside in the object that is meditated upon’. (John Haffenden, ‘Geoffrey Hill’, Viewpoints: Poets in Conversation with John Haffenden (London: Faber and Faber, 1981), pp. 76-99 (p. 90).) D27. Unnecessary Words When composing and revising, you should always be ready to consider whether or not a point might be made more succinctly and persuasively if certain words were removed, either because they distract from the main sense of the sentence or because they involve needless re-iteration. You should also be wary of proffering an interesting irrelevance; always ask yourself if the point you wish to make will serve the argument well at the point where you introduce it, or if it risks distracting the reader into a side-contemplation which fails to connect clearly to the main matter in hand. E: QUOTATIONS In an essay on literature, quotations are often essential to support your arguments, and the analysis of quotations is where much of the most valuable intellectual work is done. This section aims to address frequently observed points of confusion regarding the integration of quotations with the essayist’s own commentary. The correct methods for attributing quotations to their sources can be found in Section F: REFERENCES AND FOOTNOTES below. E1. Presentation of Quotations Short quotations need not be set aside on the page but can work (and look) better retained in the body of your paragraph. Longer quotations in an essay (usually three or more lines of verse or an equivalent amount of prose) should be inset – in other words, set-aside on the page – for the reader’s ease of assimilation. a.) Short Quotations Embedded in Your Text Always use single quotation marks round quotations, except when you have a quotation within a quotation; here the inner quotation should be in double quotation marks. (NB: In North American conventions, as you will see in some critical works, the practice is the other way round.) Here is the standard MHRA-recommended way of doing it:
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Bottom thinks he would make a wonderful lion: ‘I will roar, that I will make the Duke say “Let him roar again; let him roar again!”’ (Midsummer Night’s Dream, I.ii.67-9). If there is a line break in the original verse, mark it with a diagonal slash, and keep the original capitalization (if any) at the start of the new line: Horatio tells Hamlet that the watchmen have seen ‘a figure like your father / Armed at point exactly, cap-à-pie’ (Hamlet, I.ii.199-200). b.) Longer Quotations Separated from Your Text (Inset Quotations)
Although the main body of your essay should be double-spaced, inset quotations should be singlespaced and indented from the left-hand and right-hand margins of your prose. (To do this using Word, click on Format, then choose Paragraph and Indent and add indentations of, say, 1cm to the left and right.) Note that, as a general rule, and for clarity’s sake, breaking a sentence of your essay across an inset quotation is best avoided. Lay out the quoted matter exactly as in the original text. If quoting verse, retain the same capital letters and the same arrangement and indentation of lines (you do not need to indicate line breaks with a diagonal slash in an inset quotation). Examples: Out upon it! I have loved Three whole days together; And am like to love three more If it prove fair weather. (Suckling, ‘Out Upon It!’) When Sir Beelzebub called for his syllabub in the hotel in Hell Where Proserpine first fell, Blue as the gendarmerie were the waves of the sea, (Rocking and shocking the barmaid). (Edith Sitwell, ‘Sir Beelzebub’) Do not put quotation marks around inset quotations unless they are wholly or partially in direct speech in the original. In this example, parts of the original are in direct speech: The landlady knocked at the door. ‘Come in’, said Viola. ‘There is a letter for you’, said the landlady, ‘a special letter’ – she held the green envelope in a corner of her dingy apron. (Katherine Mansfield, ‘The Swing of the Pendulum’) 36
This rule does not apply to speeches from plays, which do not require quotation marks. RIGHT: To be, or not to be, that is the question: Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles And by opposing end them. (Hamlet, III.i.56-60) E2. Choice of Apt Quotations Make sure that every quotation you include does actually illustrate or prove the point in hand. Be discriminating, and look to utilize phrases or passages that help to carry forward your argument, and that you in turn can elaborate upon in order to take the enquiry further still. Do not quote just for the sake of quoting, as here: Antipholus invites the merchant to dine at ‘my inn’. E3. Accuracy of Quotations Copy quotations accurately, even down to the author’s punctuation marks; there is absolutely no excuse for mistakes when you have the source text in front of you. If a word is misspelled, misused or handled in an unconventional manner by the author being quoted, insert the acronym ‘sic’ (the Latin adverb meaning ‘so’ or ‘thus’) in square brackets after the word in question to indicate that the error, or odd usage, is not your own. This is the standard short-hand way of saying ‘it was thus in the original’. For example: In his preface, the Right Reverend Gideon B. Goode claims that he would like the reader ‘to remain focussed [sic] on thoughts of death and life’s ephemerality.’ ‘Focussed’ should, of course, read ‘focused’. The use of ‘[sic]’ makes it clear that the spelling error is the Reverend’s, not yours. (We are all weak and erring mortals, but one should never allow someone else’s lapse to be mistaken for one’s own.) E4. Misrepresentation of Quotations Be very careful not to misrepresent the original text by omitting part of a sentence so that the original meaning is changed. ORIGINAL TEXT: I found the play so bad that my urge to leave after the first act was compelling. MISLEADING QUOTATION: One critic said that he ‘found the play […] compelling.’ ORIGINAL TEXT: Swift wrote that, according to an American friend of his, ‘a young healthy child well nursed is at a year a most delicious, nourishing and wholesome food’. 37
MISLEADING QUOTATION: Swift wrote that ‘a young healthy child well nursed is at a year a most delicious, nourishing and wholesome food’. E5. ‘Quotation-Snatching’ Whenever you include a direct quotation, make sure that you contextualize it sufficiently (for instance, by clarifying who is speaking, and to whom, what the mood or subject is, or what is happening plot-wise) so that the reader will immediately understand it. What you are quoting needs to make sense in its own right within your essay; though the reader may choose to cross-refer to the texts from which you quote, you should not quote in such an enigmatic or under-explained way that he or she is forced to break off from your essay, turn to the text cited in order to fathom the point you are trying to make, and then return to your prose. Never assume ‘the marker of this essay will know, or can look up, what I’m quoting from, so I’ll just copy these few words from the text and they can work things out from there’; rather, imagine that your addressee is someone who has not yet read, or who may have read but cannot instantly recall, and certainly should not be expected to look up, the text from which you are quoting. It can take practice and vigilance to move back and forth between your words and those of others without creating strains or delays for the reader, but you must work to get this right. E6. Grammatical Integration A quotation should always either make grammatical sense in itself or, if it forms part of one of your sentences, be incorporated in a grammatically supportable way. WRONG: Egeon says that he ‘Hopeless and helpless doth Egeon wend’. RIGHT: Egeon says of himself ‘Hopeless and helpless doth Egeon wend’. Running quoted matter into a sentence can sometimes be problematic when you are drawing on texts from earlier periods in which phrasing and syntax were different from modern usage, as here: Chaucer’s Monk is described as being ‘abbot able’. Chaucer’s phrase does not fit comfortably into this modern English sentence structure. Here it would be better to quote a little more of the original text: Chaucer’s Monk is described as ‘a manly man, to be an abbot able’. E7. Punctuation before a Quotation Use a colon, rather than a comma or semi-colon, to introduce a quotation in those cases where the words preceding the quotation constitute a complete sentence, as in the following example: There are redemptive intimations in the closing lines of Larkin’s poem: We slowed again, 38
And as the tightened brakes took hold, there swelled A sense of falling, like an arrow-shower Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain. NB: If you introduce a quotation with a colon, your sentence should not continue after the end of the quotation. WRONG: For Cleopatra, Antony’s death marks the end of a heroic age: ‘there is nothing left remarkable / Beneath the visiting moon’ (Antony and Cleopatra, IV.xv.67-8), and the play ends with her suicide. With regard to incomplete sentences ahead of quotations, you normally need a comma before the quotation. Do not use a colon in such cases. WRONG: As the Bible says: ‘a soft answer turneth away wrath’ (Proverbs 15.1). RIGHT: As the Bible says, ‘a soft answer turneth away wrath’ (Proverbs 15.1). It is also common practice to use a comma in cases such as this: Charlotte Brontë observes, ‘Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion.’ (From a technical point of view, the comma here may seem redundant: it does not perform its usual role of demarcating grammatically discrete units in order to retain sense. But the belief that it must be used in such instances is so pervasive and entrenched that not to use it will strike most readers as an error.) However, it is not always appropriate to use a comma to run incomplete sentences into textual quotations; it depends on the structure both of your sentence and of the quoted matter. Consider these four cases: What Kurtz means by ‘“The horror! The horror!”’ is none too clear. When Egeon says ‘Hopeless and helpless doth Egeon wend, / But to procrastinate his lifeless end’ (Comedy of Errors, I.i.157-8), the rhyme serves to emphasize his despair. Nabokov informs his readers that ‘Lolita has no moral in tow’. Comparing descriptions of funerals by H. G. Wells and by Dickens, E. M. Forster argues that they have the same point of view and even use the same tricks of style […] They are, both, humorists and visualizers who get an effect by cataloguing details and whisking the page over irritably. They are generous-minded; they hate 39
shams and enjoy being indignant about them; they are valuable social reformers; they have no notion of confining books to a library shelf. In each example (including the final one, with its inset quotation), the words of the source material form an integral part of your sentence both grammatically and in terms of sense, and any punctuation mark used to introduce them would be unjustified. E8. Punctuation after a Quotation If your own sentence continues after the end of an embedded quotation with a comment or a reference, you must omit the final punctuation mark in the quotation, unless it is a question mark or exclamation mark necessary to the sense. WRONG: Adriana feels neglected: ‘His company must do his minions grace / Whilst I at home starve for a merry look.’ (Comedy of Errors, II.i.87-8) She is a very jealous wife. RIGHT: Adriana feels neglected: ‘His company must do his minions grace / Whilst I at home starve for a merry look’ (Comedy of Errors, II.i.87-8). She is a very jealous wife. (Note how in the incorrect example the bracketed reference is left hanging inexplicably between two sentences.) If your sentence terminates with a quotation which itself finishes with a punctuation mark in the source material, you should cease quoting just before the author’s punctuation mark. WRONG: As Jane Eyre makes clear at the very start of her narrative, ‘There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.’. WRONG/ODD: As Jane Eyre makes clear at the very start of her narrative, ‘There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.’ RIGHT: As Jane Eyre makes clear at the very start of her narrative, ‘There was no possibility of taking a walk that day’. For guidance on appropriate punctuation at the end of an inset quotation, see entry E10 below.) E9. Punctuation Surrounding Quotations within Sentences If you are incorporating a short quotation from a text within a sentence, be sure that the punctuation you use is not misleading to the reader and that you retain the grammatical sense of your sentence as a whole. In many instances, wedging a snatch of quoted matter between commas is grammatically wrong and highly liable to confuse the reader. Use of a colon or semi-colon to herald the quotation is also incorrect if your sentence construction carries on after the closing quotation marks. In some cases, brackets – or else dashes on either side of the quotation – will be appropriate for setting aside this material in such a way as to keep the grammatical structure of the 40
sentence as a whole intact. Alternatively, you could consider re-structuring your phrasing so that a new sentence commences after the quoted matter. WRONG: (with commas): In the poem ‘Digging’, Seamus Heaney’s sense of guilty dissociation from his rural ancestors, ‘I’ve no spade to follow men like them’, is inseparable from an affirmative sense of literary vocation. WRONG (with a misused colon): In the poem ‘Digging’, Seamus Heaney’s sense of guilty dissociation from his rural ancestors: ‘I’ve no spade to follow men like them’ is inseparable from an affirmative sense of literary vocation. WRONG (with a misused colon and a rogue comma): In the poem ‘Digging’, Seamus Heaney’s sense of guilty dissociation from his rural ancestors: ‘I’ve no spade to follow men like them’, is inseparable from an affirmative sense of literary vocation. RIGHT (with brackets): In the poem ‘Digging’, Seamus Heaney’s sense of guilty dissociation from his rural ancestors (‘I’ve no spade to follow men like them’) is inseparable from an affirmative sense of literary vocation. RIGHT (with dashes and slight rephrasing): In the poem ‘Digging’, Seamus Heaney’s sense of guilty dissociation from his rural ancestors – as conveyed in the admission ‘I’ve no spade to follow men like them’ – is inseparable from an affirmative sense of literary vocation. (Commas, instead of dashes, would be equally fine in this last instance.) E10. The Use of Ellipses If, in order to retain either relevance or grammatical sense, you omit certain words from within the material you are quoting, you should provide an ellipsis (a row of three dots) in square brackets, thus: […]. Leave a character space on either side of the ellipsis. The brackets are to distinguish your deliberate, signposted omission of textual matter from what might otherwise be read as an author’s own row of dots. You may also want to type […] at the beginning and/or end of an inset quotation from a poem to indicate that what you have chosen to quote starts and/or ends mid-line, but you would not normally do this if running a snatch of quoted verse into the main body of your essay. Avoid using a row of dots before or after all other inset quotations (in other words, from prose or from full lines of poetry). If an inset quotation omits some lines of verse, put the ellipsis at the end of the line before the omission, as in this example: My long two-pointed ladder’s sticking through a tree Toward Heaven still […] My instep arch not only keeps the ache, It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round. (Robert Frost, ‘After Apple-Picking’) 41
An ellipsis should also be provided at the end of an inset quotation if: i) ii)
the textual matter you are quoting ends with either a punctuation mark other than a full stop (in which case you should stop quoting immediately before this) or no punctuation mark at all, and you are starting a new sentence immediately after the quotation (as will often be the case).
NB: An inset quotation should not end with a comma, colon or semi-colon.
EXAMPLE: Actually, the rain was less heavy than it had been, the thunder was more distant and the lightning, instead of darting ice-blue from black clouds, wriggled slowly, an orange trickle, down a primrose-coloured sky. I was too frightened to mind the storm, though it increased my wretchedness[…] (In the original, from L. P. Hartley’s The Go-Between, there is a semi-colon after ‘wretchedness’.) An acceptable, though less common, alternative to an ellipsis in such a case would be a full stop within square brackets. E11. Altering or Adding Words within Quotations When using an embedded quotation within a sentence, it is often problematic to tweak the wording of the quoted matter so that it fits the grammar of your own sentence, even if you use square brackets to identify precisely the nature of your alteration. It should be possible to arrange the sentence so that the meaning of the quotation is quite clear, and so that the sentence and the quotation fit together in a grammatically correct way. You may sometimes need to insert a name in square brackets to make a reference clear (this addition of one’s own words to quoted matter is called ‘interpolation’), but it is better to change the wording of the prose preceding the quotation. AWKWARD: Macbeth says ‘She [Lady Macbeth] should have died hereafter’ (V.iii.16). BETTER: Macbeth says of his wife, ‘She should have died hereafter’ (V.iii.16). It is considered best practice not to change the form of a verb in a quotation in order to achieve a grammatical fit between the quoted and the non-quoted parts of a sentence. If, for instance, you wished to quote a line from the Derek Walcott poem ‘A Lesson for This Sunday’ – ‘The mind swings inward on itself in fear’ – the following alteration, without square brackets, would be wrong: Walcott intensifies the mood of psychological dislocation when he writes of ‘the mind swinging inward on itself in fear’.
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To alter the verb using square brackets would be editorially scrupulous, though some readers might consider this slightly awkward (opinions differ here): Walcott intensifies the mood of psychological dislocation when he writes of ‘the mind swing[ing] inward on itself in fear’. There are always ways of re-structuring a sentence so that the problem does not arise: Walcott intensifies the mood of psychological dislocation when he writes, ‘The mind swings inward on itself in fear’. In his line ‘The mind swings inward on itself in fear’, Walcott intensifies the mood of psychological dislocation. It is particularly awkward to insert several words in square brackets within a quotation. The MHRA Style Book provides an example of this kind of interpolation: ‘This play [writes Dr Johnson, referring to Cymbeline] has many just sentiments, some natural dialogues and some pleasing scenes.’ As the MHRA’s guide points out, one can avoid interpolation easily by opening and closing quotation marks in the following way: ‘This play’, writes Dr Johnson, referring to Cymbeline, ‘has many just sentiments, some natural dialogues and some pleasing scenes.’ Neater still might be a slight reorganization of the sentence as a whole: Referring to Cymbeline, Dr Johnson notes that ‘this play has many just sentiments, some natural dialogues and some pleasing scenes.’ Sometimes it might seem odd, or even wrong, not to alter pronouns within a quotation when running the quoted matter into one’s own sentence. For instance, the switch from the third to the first person in this sentence construction would probably strike most readers as jarring and ungainly: In his preface to Oliver Twist, Dickens defends his realistic depiction of the conduct of the prostitute Nancy as being true to ‘what I often saw and read of, in actual life around me’. Switching from ‘I’ to ‘he’ and ‘me’ to ‘him’ within the quotation would preserve the grammatical sense of the sentence as a whole, and is generally regarded as permissible, provided that square brackets are used to make the nature of the small alteration absolutely clear: 43
In his preface to Oliver Twist, Dickens defends his realistic depiction of the conduct of the prostitute Nancy as being true to ‘what [he] often saw and read of, in actual life around [him]’. Nonetheless, it might be better still to avoid this quandary by rethinking the relations between one’s own prose and the words being considered for quotation: In his preface to Oliver Twist, Dickens defends his realistic depiction of the conduct of the prostitute Nancy as being an accurate reflection of what he ‘often saw and read of, in actual life’. E12. The Use of Upper and Lower Case in Quotations When running a quotation into the main body of your prose, it is acceptable (and, to some, preferable) to change an initial upper-case letter to lower-case in order to make the quoted matter accord with the grammar of the sentence into which it has been incorporated. For instance, many would prefer the second to the first example here: Elizabeth Jennings describes the gardener as ‘Quietly godlike’ in stanza two. Elizabeth Jennings describes the gardener as ‘quietly godlike’ in stanza two. There is also a convention allowing (or, again, preferring) the alteration of lower-case to uppercase letters when incorporating a quotation into an essay title; one might, for instance, find an essay entitled ‘“Quietly Godlike”: The Human and the Divine in the Poetry of Elizabeth Jennings’ – even though the ‘g’ of ‘godlike’ is lower-case in the text from which the quotation derives. F: REFERENCES AND FOOTNOTES All quoted matter in an essay, and all other material drawn upon in your prose but not quoted directly, must be accurately and consistently attributed to its source. You must ensure that you have read, and that you fully understand, both the information about plagiarism in the English Undergraduate Handbook and the earlier section of the present booklet headed ‘Plagiarism, and How to Avoid It’. F1. Referring to Works and Parts of Works Entries later in this section will show you when and how to provide the footnotes or bracketed details necessary for identifying the source of each quotation or reference in your essay. First, here are some basic things to know regarding the way texts, and parts of texts, are commonly identified in critical essays. a) The Titles of Works: Italics or Quotation Marks? Use single quotation marks to identify the titles of poems (‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’), short stories (‘The Fall of the House of Usher’) and essays (‘The Shooting of the Bears: Poetry and Politics in Andrew Marvell’). Use italics for the titles of books (Great Expectations) and journals 44
(Essays in Criticism). Italics should also be employed when referring to long poems published as books (Paradise Lost) and to plays (The Plough and the Stars). Avoid bold type and underlining. b) Referring to Line and Page Numbers If line numbers are given in the edition you are using, quote by line number only; if not, give the page number. In continuous prose, the words ‘line’ and ‘page’ should be used, but in bracketed references and footnotes the abbreviations ‘l.’ and ‘ll.’ (for ‘line’ and ‘lines’) and ‘p.’ and ‘pp.’ (for ‘page’ and ‘pages’) are the norm. Always leave a character space between the dot and the number: p. 62, ll. 98-101, and so forth. If there is a risk in a particular case that the ‘l.’ or ‘ll.’ might be confused with the Arabic numerals ‘one’ or ‘eleven’, feel free to spell out ‘line’ or ‘lines’. If you want to refer to a passage without specifying exactly where it ends, you can use ‘ff.’, which stands for ‘following’: ‘see ll. 123 ff.’ c) Referring to Parts of Poems You only need to provide line numbers when referencing poems (usually long ones) where such numbers are provided in the margins of the text from which you are quoting. It is no help to the reader (and no fun for you or them) to count manually through the lines of a poem in order to identify the passage in question. Give the page number instead. When a long poem has subdivisions of some kind, further information will be necessary; in discussing Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, for instance, you may need to give the fragment number, and/or the title of the tale, if the context could be confusing otherwise. For works divided into books, such as Spenser’s Faerie Queene, or into cantos, such as Byron’s Don Juan, you should provide numbers that identify the relevant part from which you are quoting in addition to the specific line number(s). d) Referring to Parts of Novels One usually provides page numbers only, although there may be occasions where providing a chapter number as well is appropriate. e) Referring to Parts of Plays There are various ways of giving references to plays. One common convention is to use large Roman numerals for the act, small Roman for the scene, and Arabic for the lines – for example, III.i.123 for Act III, Scene I, line 123. However, some editors use Arabic numerals only: 3.1.123. f) Referring to Books of the Bible It is not customary to italicize the word Bible or the titles of individual books. Use Roman numerals for the numbers of books, and Arabic numerals (separated by a full stop and a character space) for chapters and verses. Examples: Isaiah 22. 17 II Corinthians 5. 13-15. 45
g) Referring to Parts of Manuscripts (This entry will seem strange to the uninitiated, but should prove useful if and when you encounter different kinds of literary manuscript.) In the first citation of a manuscript source you should give the full name of the collection; after that abbreviations can be employed. Use the classification system of the manuscript collection to which you are referring. For folios use the abbreviation ‘fol’ or ‘fols’ (‘ff.’ could be confused with the abbreviation used to indicate ‘following pages’, as explained in entry b above on line numbers); to specify recto and verso r v (right- and left-hand pages) use the superscript symbols and . r
RIGHT: British Library / BL, MS Cotton Caligula D III, fol. 15 . h) Using Short Titles and Abbreviations to Refer to Works In an extended discussion of literary works across an essay, it is not always necessary to give the full title of a text every time you quote from or refer to it. For instance, in an essay on Laurence Sterne’s novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759-67), you should give the full title the first time you mention it but thereafter would do well to refer to Tristram Shandy. Just so, repeat references to James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1914-15) could usefully shorten the title to A Portrait. This kind of truncation can help to avoid cumbersomely wordy sentences. However, if a title is already short, do not shorten it further. (There may, of course, be occasions when you can omit the title altogether if it is already completely clear which work you are quoting from or discussing.) Abbreviations of long titles are sometimes useful in notes or bracketed references (but should be avoided in the prose of your sentences). If, for example, you are writing about the Wife of Bath’s Prologue by Chaucer, you can refer to it as WBPr, as long as the abbreviation is explained in a footnote at the beginning of your discussion. Check the edition you are using for standard abbreviations, or consult your tutor; do not invent your own abbreviation. WRONG: SGATGK for Sir Gawain and the Green Knight RIGHT: SGGK The remainder of section F is concerned with the acknowledgment of sources. The entries below make clear how to incorporate all appropriate acknowledgments to others into your essay – through either footnotes or bracketed references. Consistency of method is the ground rule when it comes to identifying one’s sources. Beyond this, provided that all necessary information is given to make every reference clear, precise and traceable, economy of presentation is the goal; references – either at the foot of the page or worked into one’s prose – are essential asides, but they are still asides, and as such should be delivered as concisely as possible.
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The referencing conventions described in this section are derived from the previously mentioned MHRA Style Book. You should be aware that a number of other conventions are followed by academics, most notably the MLA (Modern Languages Association) style and the Chicago style. You do not need to learn the rules for these alternative referencing methods, but you should be aware that in the course of your studies at Bristol you will read books, articles and editions presented in accordance with them. If you wish (if, for instance, you are an American student already used to the Chicago or MLA system), you may follow a referencing style other than the MHRA one in your essays at Bristol – but it must be an accepted style, rather than your own invention, and you must use it consistently. F2. Providing References in Footnotes Quotations from secondary material, or from literary works only touched on in passing in your essay, should be attributed to their sources in notes. You are permitted to use either footnotes or endnotes, though the former are more reader-friendly. a) Providing a Footnote Number at the End of a Sentence Footnote reference numbers – which you can produce in Microsoft Word by choosing Insert and then Footnote – should be placed at the ends of sentences (unless there are two or more references in the same sentence: see F2.b below). Note that the number at the end of the sentence should come AFTER the closing punctuation mark. WRONG: William Empson claims that an ‘interest in “atmospheres” is a critical attitude designed for, and particularly suited to, the poets of the nineteenth century. 1’ WRONG: William Empson claims that an ‘interest in “atmospheres” is a critical attitude designed for, and particularly suited to, the poets of the nineteenth century’1. RIGHT: William Empson claims that an ‘interest in “atmospheres” is a critical attitude designed for, and particularly suited to, the poets of the nineteenth century’.1 b) Dealing with Multiple References per Sentence If you quote from two different works in one sentence, it is preferable to put the first reference number at a natural break (comma or semi-colon), where possible, rather than mid-phrase; try to make your prose as reader-friendly as possible. On the odd occasion that several short quotations from different texts are run into one sentence, put just one footnote number at the end of the sentence and gather your several references into a single footnote, listing them in the order in which they appear in your text. c) Presenting the First Footnote Reference to a Work On the first footnote reference to each work from which you quote you should provide full publication details, along with the relevant page number, or numbers (or, in certain cases, the line number, or numbers). Entries F2.e onwards below describe the different ways of citing different kinds of work; in the case of the example in entry F2.a above, the note would run as follows: 47
William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (London: Chatto & Windus, 1930), p. 20. If a reference is to more than one page from a source, you should use ‘pp.’ instead of ‘p.’. For example: William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (London: Chatto & Windus, 1930), pp. 19-20. Note that there is no comma after the title of the work and before the opening bracket (see entry B16). Note also that there is a character space between ‘p.’ or ‘pp.’ and the page number(s). The use of ‘pg.’ should be avoided. Almost all notes should not have a ‘hereafter referred to as…’ or ‘Further references are to this edition’ formula. See F3 (a) for further guidance as to when such a formula is relevant. Each note should end with a full stop, even when, as here, it does not constitute a sentence. All notes should also be single-spaced, with no blank lines between one and the next. d) Presenting Further Footnote References to the Same Work After providing a full reference in an initial footnote, a short-hand one should be given in any subsequent note: for example, Empson, p. 65. The only situation in which you would provide more details than this in a follow-up reference to a previously cited work is if your essay draws upon different works by authors (or editors) who share a surname, or if you quote from more than one work by the same author. If, say, your essay also contained a quotation from Empson’s book Some Versions of Pastoral (London: Chatto & Windus, 1935), then, in notes subsequent to the first footnote reference to each (that is, to the one that gives the full publication details), you would provide both the surname and the title (or, if the title is long, a suitably shortened version of it), in repeat references: Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, p. 82, or Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral, p. 67. e) Providing First References to Books When referencing a quotation from a book, the first footnote which mentions this book should provide the following details in the following order: author’s name (first name or initial(s) before last name); title; editor (if relevant); edition number or name – e.g. ‘2nd edn’, ‘Arden edn’ (if relevant); place of publication; name of publisher; year of publication; and page number(s). Note the conventions and abbreviations used below (‘edn’ for edition, ‘ed. by’ for ‘edited by’), and also the forms of punctuation employed at different points in the reference (commas, colons and brackets). William Shakespeare, The Comedy of Errors, ed. by R. A. Foakes, Arden edn (London: Methuen, 1962), p. xlii. NB: If the book for which you provide an initial footnote of this kind is a literary work from which you quote repeatedly in your essay, you can significantly reduce the total number of 48
footnotes for your essay by incorporating further page references to such a work in the essay itself: on the appropriate way of doing this, see entry F3 below. If the work cited is in translation, use ‘trans. by’ to identify the relevant name (or names): Simone De Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. by H. M. Pashley (London: Pan, 1988) f) Identifying Publication Details Correctly Publication details are found on a book’s imprint page (on the reverse of the title page). You do not usually need to mention re-printings; the first publication date is enough. But if you are using an edition identified as, for example, 2nd, 3rd or revised, this detail must be mentioned. (There are often textual and pagination differences between one edition of a work and another, whereas reprintings tend to be identical in these respects.) If a book has been published simultaneously in several countries, it is usually sufficient to cite the one most appropriate to you – London, rather than Tel Aviv or Berkeley. Make sure that you do not confuse the place of printing or the printing company with the place or name of the book’s publishers. WRONG: Pat Barker, The Eye in the Door (St Ives: Clays Ltd, 1994) RIGHT: Pat Barker, The Eye in the Door (London: Penguin, 1994) g) Providing First References to Essays or Chapters in Books Essays or chapters in an edited collection of works by different authors should be cited by author and title (first of the individual essay and then of the collection), and should identify the first and last page numbers of the piece; if you are referring to a specific page, put that in brackets after the complete page range. Andrew and Catherine Belsey, ‘Icons of Divinity: Portraits of Elizabeth I’, in Renaissance Bodies: The Human Figure in English Culture c. 1540-1660, ed. by Lucy Gent and Nigel Llewellyn (London: Reaktion Books, 1990), pp. 11-35 (p. 30). h) Providing First References to Articles in Journals and Newspapers For a journal article in a footnote, the order is author (first name or initial(s) before last name); article title; journal title; volume number; date in brackets; page number(s). Note where commas and brackets are used in the example below. In the first citation of a journal article, you should give the full page range, but you do not need to put ‘p.’ or ‘pp.’, except when indicating a particular page in brackets. G. R. Elliott, ‘Weirdness in The Comedy of Errors’, University of Toronto Quarterly, 60 (1939), 95-106 (p. 102). References to newspaper articles give precise calendar dates (these are not in brackets) and omit any initial ‘The’ in the paper’s title: 49
Seamus Heaney, ‘The Poet as Witness and Victim’, Irish Times, 6 April 1991, ‘Weekend’ section, 9. i) Providing First References to Multi-Volume Works If you refer to a multi-volume work, put the total number of volumes just before the publication details; the number of the particular volume you are citing comes after the publication details (use Roman numerals), and is followed by the page number(s). John Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens, 2nd edn, 2 vols (London: Dent, 1927), I, pp. 35-36. Thomas Nashe, The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. by R. McKerrow, 2nd edn, rev. by F. P. Wilson, 5 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958), III, pp. 95-96. Observe that this note begins with Thomas Nashe, not R. McKerrow; in footnotes (and in bibliographies), primary texts should always be cited first by author (or if anonymous, by title), not by editor. If different volumes of a multi-volume work were published in different years, you should give the year of publication of the specific volume cited in brackets after its number: Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs, 6 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1956-71), III: 1807-1814 (1959), 281. j) Providing First References to Internet Sources There is no single standard method of citation for internet sources; in the light of this, the advice given here is tentative. Obviously, it is helpful for essayists to give as much information as possible, so that the reader can find easily the material that has been consulted: author’s name (where available), title of work, and so forth. Give the exact URL (‘Uniform Resource Locator’) address of the web-page consulted, enclosing this within angled brackets: < >. If this address is unhelpfully long, give the URL of the site’s search page or home page. Article titles should be in single inverted commas, as if they were journal article or book chapter titles. The titles of e-text versions of literary works that also exist in book form should be set in italics. If there is a date of posting to the net on the document, mention this. Give also the last date on which you consulted the document. Here are two examples: Andrew Zurcher, ‘English Handwriting 1500-1700: Bibliography and Research Resources’, , posted 01.01.1985, consulted 11.09.03. Samuel Butler, Erewhon, , consulted 10.10.08. Note that the online encyclopaedia Wikipedia, though widely consulted and often useful, is not a refereed website; its articles and entries have not been editorially scrutinized, nor has the information they contain been verified by experts as accurate. For this reason, many academics 50
remain sniffy about references to this source. Remember that there are many scholarly websites, the contents of which have been approved by an editor or editorial board. When referencing articles found on academic websites such as ‘J-STOR’, provide the full publication details as given on that site (so that the works can be consulted in their printed versions, if desired), not simply a reference to the website address. ACCEPTABLE: Matthew Hofer, ‘“Between Worlds”: W. S. Merwin and Paul Celan’, New German Critique, No. 91 (winter 2004), 101-15 (p. 107), , accessed 27.09.09. NOT ACCEPTABLE: Matthew Hofer, ‘“Between Worlds”: W. S. Merwin and Paul Celan’, , accessed 27.09.09. NOT ACCEPTABLE: Matthew Hofer, ‘“Between Worlds”: W. S. Merwin and Paul Celan’, J-STOR. k) Providing References to Dictionary Definitions and Encyclopaedia Entries You can refer to such an entry either by its heading (term/phrase/name), or by page number. J. A. Cuddon, A Dictionary of Literary Terms, revised edn (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), s.v. ‘Ballad’. (The abbreviation ‘s.v.’ stands for the Latin ‘sub verbo’, meaning ‘under the word’.) A later reference to the same source would simply read, for example, Cuddon, s.v. ‘Lyric’. l) Referencing Quotations Borrowed from another Critic You may wish to reference a quotation by a writer whom you have not yourself read, but have found quoted by another critic. This is how you should do it: John Kerrigan, quoted by Frank Kermode, Shakespeare’s Language (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000), p. 51. If you have already cited the source text in an earlier footnote, you can simply give the author (and the title too if necessary: see F2.d above), followed directly by the relevant page number. John Kerrigan, quoted by Kermode, p. 51. m) The Use of ‘Ibid.’ and ‘Op.cit.’ You will sometimes see these abbreviations in the notes of books and articles. ‘Ibid.’ (a truncation of the Latin ‘ibidem’, meaning ‘in the same place’) can be applied to refer to the immediately preceding reference – but only to this, and not to earlier references. 51
RIGHT (if the page number in the second reference is the same): 33 Brian Friel, Translations (London: Faber and Faber, 1981), p. 33. 34 Ibid. RIGHT (if the text in the second reference is the same, but the page number is different): 33 Brian Friel, Translations (London: Faber and Faber, 1981), p. 33. 34 Ibid., p. 45. WRONG: 33 Brian Friel, Translations (London: Faber and Faber, 1981), p. 33. 34 Horace Boardwalk, ‘Friel on Fire’, Thespian Studies, 17 (1989), 17-42 (p. 18). 35 Friel, Ibid., p. 45. For note 35 above, you should write Translations, not Ibid. The abbreviation ‘op. cit.’ (from the post-classical Latin ‘opere citato’, meaning ‘in the work quoted’) is occasionally used to refer back to titles identified earlier in the notes, but its usage so frequently either leads to confusion or seems redundant that it has fallen into something close to disrepute. It is recommended that you avoid it. n) Referencing an Introduction Here is an example of how to refer to the introduction to a literary work: David Bradshaw, Introduction, Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse, Oxford World Classics edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 1-14 (p. 12). If the Introduction page numbers are in Roman numerals, reproduce these. Single inverted commas around the word ‘Introduction’ (or ‘Preface’, or ‘Foreword’, etc) are optional; practice varies. Choose to use them or not and be consistent. In the example given above, although David Bradshaw is the editor of the novel, his name is not recorded again after the title of the work; the reader’s assumption in such a case will be that the author of the introduction is also the editor. When the editor of the text and the author of the introduction are different people proceed as follows: J. Hillis Miller, Introduction, Charles Dickens, Bleak House, ed. by Norman Page (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), pp. 11-34. o) Referencing Pictures Occasionally it may be useful or desirable to reproduce a picture in an essay, although you should avoid the temptation to furnish your essay with illustrations unless they seem integral to your argument. A picture can be inserted at the relevant point or provided in an appendix. If doing the latter, put the words ‘see Appendix’ in brackets where appropriate in your prose. Wherever 52
the picture is placed, you should provide beneath it the artist’s name (or ‘Anon.’ if unknown), the title of the work and details of the source from which you obtained it, be this a website address or a book. As with other reference wording, these details contribute towards the essay’s overall word-count. If providing more than one picture, identify these as ‘Fig. 1’, ‘Fig. 2’, and so forth, and cross-refer to the relevant figure number in the appendix – if you use one – accordingly (for example: ‘see Appendix, Fig. 2’). p) Referencing Films Titles of films should be italicized. Footnote references, identifying the director, should be presented as follows: John Ford, dir., The Grapes of Wrath (20th Century Fox, 1940). If relevant, add details, in a second set of parentheses, of the DVD consulted: (20th Century Fox Home Entertainment DVD, 2012). F3. Providing References in the Main Body of the Essay In the event of multiple quotations from and/or commentary on specific moments in primary texts, it is more economical, and less distracting, to provide bracketed references to the relevant page or line number(s) in the main body of your essay. But take note of the following. a.) Preparing the Reader for Bracketed References The very first time you quote from a work for which you intend to provide bracketed references, an initial note will be needed in order to make clear the publication details. The footnote should be presented in the conventional way, but should conclude with the formulation given at the end of this example: Author, Title (Place: Publisher, Year), p. 23. All further references will be to this edition. After providing subsequent quotations from this text in your essay, simply open brackets, type ‘p.’ (or ‘pp.’), a character space and the page number(s) and close the brackets. (There may be occasions when line numbers, rather than page numbers, are appropriate: see F1.b and F1.c above.) NB: bracketed numbers in the essay should not be provided when the first footnote reference to the primary text is given, as in that case the page (or line) number(s) should be in the note instead. The ‘All further references…’ formulation is, in effect, a way of saying ‘there are going to be no more footnotes to this: instead, page references will be provided in the body of the essay itself’. You should not provide this formulation for works that you will cite more than once in the notes: this would be not merely redundant but also (given the way the formulation conventionally functions) misleading. When quoting in your essay from several primary works by one author published in a collected edition (for instance, several poems, plays, short stories, essays or letters from a volume of the same), you need cite the edition only once, when you first mention it.
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John Donne, ‘The Sun Rising’, in The Complete English Poems, ed. by A. J. Smith (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), pp. 80-81; all references to Donne’s poems are taken from this edition. This note, too, leads the reader to expect bracketed page (or line) references in your essay thereafter. b.) Not Referencing Recurrent Identical Quotations If you repeatedly quote the same word or phrase in your essay, you do not need to reference it over and over; the first note (or bracketed reference) will have it covered. Remember the goal of economy. c.) Placing Reference Numbers after Inset Quotations A reference that follows an inset quotation in the main body of your essay should hang beneath this quotation, on the right hand side, and should not be followed by any punctuation mark. The following example is an inset quotation from an imaginary essay on the novels of Elizabeth Hardwick: The trim, conservative bachelor calls up a picture of neat clothes, shoes in wooden trees, mahogany desks with leather fittings and brass antique writing instruments; glasses and bottles and ice buckets, matching curtains and pillows chosen by decorators or women friends, striped materials on the sofa. Record collection dusted, alphabetical; a stale but tranquillizing symmetry – and certain absences, like the bathroom of a blind man, without mirrors. (Sleepless Nights, pp. 61-62) If the whole essay were on Sleepless Nights, or if it were sufficiently clear from what preceded the quotation that this was the novel being quoted, then simply putting (pp. 61-62) at end of the last line would be in order, and any more than this would be superfluous: The trim, conservative bachelor calls up a picture of neat clothes, shoes in wooden trees, mahogany desks with leather fittings and brass antique writing instruments; glasses and bottles and ice buckets, matching curtains and pillows chosen by decorators or women friends, striped materials on the sofa. Record collection dusted, alphabetical; a stale but tranquillizing symmetry– and certain absences, like the bathroom of a blind man, without mirrors. (p. 61-62)
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F4. Mentioning Sources in the Essay Itself Make sure that you identify the author of quotations as you quote them in the main body of your prose and not simply in a footnote. In other words, do not write as follows: Geoffrey Hill’s use of brackets both hides and reveals the self; the brackets ‘make possible a mingling of the candid and the covert’.1 1
Christopher Ricks, ‘Geoffrey Hill 1: “The Tongue’s Atrocities”’, The Force of Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 285-318 (p. 304).
It is not enough simply to follow the quotation with a footnote identifying your source: even though such a note ‘covers’ the attribution issue, it is slack and inert to slide between your words and those of another in this way and then let the note ‘sort it out’. Essays that move compulsively in and out of quotation marks without referring - in the essay itself - to those whose words they are drawing upon seem not merely slapdash but also relatively indifferent to the distinction between one voice (that is, one critical sensibility) and another – including the essayist’s own. Often a formula such as ‘In the words of X’, ‘As X points out’, ‘What X refers to as’, or some such, is all that is needed. Geoffrey Hill’s use of brackets both hides and reveals the self; as Christopher Ricks suggestively puts it, the brackets ‘make possible a mingling of the candid and the covert’. THEN follow this up with the requisite note! F5. Referencing Academic Staff Occasionally you might make an observation in an essay that is closely indebted to, or a paraphrase of, a remark made in a lecture, seminar or tutorial; in such instances, the scrupulous thing to do is to provide a footnote that could run, for example: This observation takes its cue from a remark made by Dr Cordelia Crumble in a lecture on ‘Poetry and Antiquity’ (31/10/2009). G: BIBLIOGRAPHY A bibliography of all works consulted (not simply those from which you have quoted) should always be included at the end of your essay. G1. Layout and Conventions The bibliography should start on a new page. It is usual to divide the list into two sections: ‘Primary Works’ and ‘Secondary Works’. The entries in both sections should be ordered alphabetically, by author’s or editor’s surname; this makes different works by one writer easier to find in a list. Entries should be single-spaced within themselves, but a blank line should be left 55
between each one. Conventions vary as to whether or not a full stop is provided at the end of an entry; the MHRA Style Book method omits full stops. Feel free to use them or leave them out, but be consistent. In most respects, bibliographical entries resemble the first, full reference to each work cited in one’s footnotes. Observe, however, that in a bibliography, it is standard practice to place the surname before the forename (or initials), with commas after each part of the name, as here: Gunn, Thom, Shelf Life: Essays, Memoirs and an Interview (London: Faber and Faber, 1993) Where there is more than one author or editor, only the first name undergoes this inversion: Gent, Lucy, and Nigel Llewellyn, eds, Renaissance Bodies: The Human Figure in English Culture c. 1540-1660 (London: Reaktion Books, 1990) The specific page numbers identified for particular references in footnotes should be excluded from the bibliography, but the first and last page numbers of articles and chapters should be retained. RIGHT: G. R. Elliott, ‘Weirdness in The Comedy of Errors’, University of Toronto Quarterly, 60 (1939), 95-106 WRONG: G. R. Elliott, ‘Weirdness in The Comedy of Errors’, University of Toronto Quarterly, 60 (1939), 95-106 (p. 102). Within each section of the bibliography, multiple entries by the same author or editor should be arranged chronologically according to date of first publication. In such cases, a long dash is commonly used to identify that the source remains the same: Meyers, Jeffrey, Manic Power: Robert Lowell and his Circle (London: Macmillan, 1987) ----------, ed., Robert Lowell: Interviews and Memoirs (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988) As in footnotes, primary texts should be listed by author, not editor or title. Anonymous texts should be listed by title; this makes them easier to find; alternatively, you could put them at the beginning of the bibliography under Anon. Examples: RIGHT: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, ed. by J. R. R. Tolkien and E. V. Gordon, 2nd edn, revised by Norman Davis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967) 56
RIGHT: Anon, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, ed. by J. R. R. Tolkien and E. V. Gordon, 2nd edn, revised by Norman Davis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967) WRONG: Tolkien, J. R. R., and E. V. Gordon, eds, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, 2nd edn, revised by Norman Davis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967) G2. Sample Bibliography Below is an illustrative mock-up of a bibliography for an imaginary essay on the poetry of Seamus Heaney. Do not assume that its length represents an accepted or expected standard; lengths of bibliographies in essays can vary considerably according to both the subject and the resources available; while you are encouraged to range widely in your reading for essays, there are no hard-and-fast rules about minimum numbers of works to consult. The mock-up identifies different kinds of text (books, chapters in books, poems and articles in journals, material sourced from the internet, and so forth) and presents their details in ways that accord with the conventions described in sections F and G above. In this particular case, both prose and poetic writings by the essay’s subject are listed among the ‘Primary Works’; an acceptable alternative would be to include the author’s prose publications in the ‘Secondary Works’ section, though such separation is probably less common.
BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary Works Heaney, Seamus, Death of a Naturalist (London: Faber and Faber, 1966) ----------, ‘Elegy for a Postman', Listener, 5 February 1970, 182 ----------, North (London: Faber and Faber, 1975) ----------, The Government of the Tongue: The 1986 T. S. Eliot Memorial Lectures and Other Critical Writings (London: Faber and Faber, 1988) ----------, Seeing Things (London: Faber and Faber, 1991) ----------, ‘At Banagher’, New Welsh Review, 5.1 (summer 1992), 11 ----------, Opened Ground: Poems 1966-1996 (London: Faber and Faber, 1998) ----------, Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971-2001 (London: Faber and Faber, 2002) 57
Secondary Works Allen, Michael, ed., Seamus Heaney, Macmillan Casebook series (London: Macmillan, 1997) Andrews, Elmer, The Poetry of Seamus Heaney: All the Realms of Whisper (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988) Brearton, Fran, ‘The End of Art: Seamus Heaney’s Apology for Poetry’, in The Great War in Irish Poetry: From W. B. Yeats to Michael Longley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 217-50 Breslin, Paul, ‘Heaney’s Redress’, Poetry, 68.6 (September 1996), 337-51 Cookson, William, and Peter Dale, eds, Agenda: Seamus Heaney Fiftieth Birthday Issue, 27.1 (spring 1989) Curtis, Tony, ed., The Art of Seamus Heaney, 4th edn (Bridgend: Poetry Wales Press, 2001) Deane, Seamus, ‘Unhappy and at Home’, transcript of an interview, in The Crane Bag Book of Irish Studies: 1977-1981, ed. by M. P. Hederman and Richard Kearney (Dublin: Blackwater, 1982), pp. 66-72 ----------, ‘Seamus Heaney: The Timorous and the Bold’, in Celtic Revivals: Essays in Modern Irish Literature 1880-1980 (London: Faber and Faber, 1985), pp. 174-86 Johnston, Dillon, ‘Violence in Seamus Heaney’s Poetry’, in The Cambridge Companion to Contemporary Irish Poetry, ed. by Matthew Campbell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 113-52 Kinahan, Frank, ‘An Interview with Seamus Heaney’, Critical Inquiry, 8 (1982), 405-14 McCrum, Robert, ‘A Life of Rhyme’, Observer, 19 July 2009, , accessed 12.08.09 McDonald, Peter, ‘Seamus Heaney as a Critic’, in Poetry in Contemporary Irish Literature, ed. by Michael Kenneally (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1995), pp. 174-89 ----------, ‘Three Critics, II: Seamus Heaney’s Redress’, in Serious Poetry: Form and Authority from Yeats to Hill (Oxford; Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 83-94 Malloy, Catharine, and Phyllis Carey, eds, Seamus Heaney: The Shaping Spirit (Newark: University of Delaware Press / London: Associated University Presses, 1996) Miller, Karl, Seamus Heaney in Conversation with Karl Miller (London: Between the Lines, 2000) 58
Murphy, Andrew, Seamus Heaney, Writers and their Work series (Plymouth: Northcote House, 1996) Vendler, Helen, ‘Seamus Heaney: The Grammatical Moment’, in The Breaking of Style: Hopkins, Heaney, Graham: The Richard Ellmann Memorial Lectures, 1994 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), pp. 41-69 Wiener, Philip, ed., Dictionary of the History of Ideas, 4 vols (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1973), s.v. ‘Authority’
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