READING ENGLISH
AND WRITING ESSAYS:
A STUDENT’S GUIDE
This booklet conflates and revises material previously contained in three separate sources: the
department’s former Style Guide (devised and developed by Professor Elizabeth Archibald), an
essay writing checklist (composed by Dr Stephen James), and certain sections of the old English
Undergraduate Handbook (2008-09 version).
It is expected that this new booklet will be revised annually; comments, queries and suggestions
for additions or improvements are most welcome. Please email these to stephen.james@bristol.
ac.uk.
For further guidance on various aspects of 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, notetaking 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.
Dr Stephen James
Head of Education
Department of English
CONTENTS
Reading English at University
3
Independent Study: A Checklist of Weekly Activities
4
Key Materials for Regular Reference
5
Taking Notes in Seminars and Tutorials
6
Taking Notes in Lectures
6
Taking Notes from Books
6
Giving a Tutorial or Seminar Presentation
7
Planning and Writing Essays
8
Plagiarism, and How to Avoid It
11
THE STYLE GUIDE:
Introduction
15
A: Essay Format and Structure
17
B: Punctuation
18
C: Word Order and Word Relations
25
D: Errors, Dangers and Grey Areas
28
E: Quotations
35
F: References and Footnotes
44
G: Bibliography
54
1
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.
2
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
 Margaret Drabble, ed., The Oxford Companion to English Literature, 6th edition (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2006), or Margaret Drabble and Jenny Stringer, eds, The Concise
Oxford Companion to English Literature, 3rd, rev. edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007)
4
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.
10
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.
13
THE STYLE GUIDE
(Revised Version, 2009)
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 MHRA’s booklet is available in both the Arts
and Social Sciences Library and the School of Humanities Study Centre (basement of 13
Woodland Road), and the very latest version is accessible on the web at www.mhra.org.uk/
Publications/Books/StyleGuide/index.html. The requirements for referencing texts according to
the MHRA method are hopefully summarized adequately in the following pages; you might,
however, find it handy to consult this publication should a point of scholarly presentation arise
on which you are not clear.
Also potentially useful are:
Gordon Jarvie, Chambers Punctuation Guide (Edinburgh: Chambers, 1992)
Randolph Quirk et al, A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language (Harlow: Longman, 1985)
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).
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 in your essay, so that it is absolutely clear
where it begins. 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.) Over-Stuffed Paragraphs
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.) Broken or ‘Unfulfilled’ Paragraphs
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
containing a disruptive side-point that could not be taken far but that the author simply did not
16
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. Surplus Commas
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.
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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. Missing Commas
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. Non-Sentences
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.
18
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. Run-on Sentences
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 often 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.
19
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. Optional Subordinate Clauses
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.)
20
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. Semi-Colons and Colons
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.) Semi-Colons
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) Colons
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.
22
B11. Apostrophes
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. Apostrophes 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. Dashes
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.
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.
23
B15. Exclamation Marks
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.
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) …
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…
24
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):
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:
25
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 a 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.
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.
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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 and Assonance
It is commonplace (and at times effective) to draw the reader’s attention to alliteration and/or
assonance 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 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.’
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…’). Also, do not substitute initials for the forenames of authors, 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.
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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
council/counsel
dependant/dependent
discreet/discrete
disinterested/uninterested
loath/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
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
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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.
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
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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
It can be jarring when an essay has ‘outside of’ for ‘outside’, ‘inside of’ for ‘inside’, ‘try and explain’
for ‘try to explain’, and so forth. 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!
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.
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b.) ‘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).
c.) ‘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
became a human skittle. Then rebuke them smartly for heralding their proclaimed literalism with
a (‘like’) simile. Savour the moment.)
d.) ‘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’.
e.) ‘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.
f.) ‘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.
g.) ‘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…
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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.
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.
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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.
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,
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‘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
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.
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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:
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:
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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’)
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.
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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’.
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’.
37
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,
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’.
38
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
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 stops at the end of a sentence in the
source material, you should cease quoting just before the author’s closing punctuation point.
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.)
39
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
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).
40
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’)
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).
41
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’.
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:
42
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:
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’.
43
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
(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.
44
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.
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
45
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.
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
46
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:
William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (London: Chatto & Windus, 1930), p. 20.
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
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.
47
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:
Seamus Heaney, ‘The Poet as Witness and Victim’, Irish Times, 6 April 1991, ‘Weekend’
section, 9.
48
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’,
<http://www.english.cam.ac.uk/ceres/ehoc/bibliography.html>, posted 01.01.1985,
consulted 11.09.03.
Samuel Butler, Erewhon, <http://lion.chadwyck.co.uk/works/search>, 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
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.
49
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), <http://www.jstor.org>, accessed 27.09.09.
NOT ACCEPTABLE:
Matthew Hofer, ‘“Between Worlds”: W. S. Merwin and Paul Celan’, <http://www.jstor.
org>, 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.
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.
50
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:
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.
33
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 occasioanlly 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.
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.
51
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.
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, p. 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)
52
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
53
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)
54
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, p. 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)
55
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, <http://www.guardian.co.uk/book/
2009jul/19/seamus-heaney-interview/print>, 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)
56
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’
57