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A Brief Guide to the Writing of Essays |
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2. Essays play a major part in the assessment of several courses in English, and Women's Writing. In some courses essays are written not as part of assessment but purely in order to develop skills and explore the subject.
Please refer to the course leaflets for the courses you are taking for clarification of assessment methods and for the function and length of the essays you will write in these courses.
3. Both in essays and in examination answers, pay close attention to the exact wording of the question, and engage immediately with its key terms, rather than writing in general about the text and its background. For example, if youu are writing on 'Is Beowulf the hero or the victim of his culture?', you should proceed directly to discussion in terms of 'hero', 'victim' and 'culture', rather than telling the story or describing its historical context. Such matters should be brought in only as they are relevant to the main line of your argument.
4. Where the essay subject relates to a text prescribed for the course, it is usually best to make reference to the prescribed edition. Useful guidance may often be obtained, however, from the more elaborate editions available in the College Library, such as the Arden editions of Shakespeare and the Twickenham edition of Pope.
5. Some advice about what to read will be given in the course leaflets and other materials distributed during courses. Works offering more comprehensive guidance for students of English include the four-volume New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, which is shelved in the reference section of the College Library. Do not hesitate to ask your course tutor or seminar leader for advice.
6. Although the Library's main collections relevant to English are in the Richards Reading-Room, it should be remembered that much related material is in other parts of the building.
7. Call numbers for some basic books for each course are usually included in the handouts for that course; but for most essays you will need to assemble a more substantial bibliography. For this, you will usually find that searching the computer catalogue (eg by title, author, subject or keyword) is the best way to begin. If you cannot locate the books you want from the information on the screen, ask the library staff to help you. (Remember that periodicals for the Arts are housed in the basement, shelved alphabetically by title). You should also be aware that some older stock is listed only on card catalogues, and may not be available except by special request at the issue desk. Again, ask the staff to help you if you cannot find what you require.
8. If the question set refers to a specific text or group of texts, the essay should be founded on a direct and independent response to that material. It would be naive to write about Adam Bede as if no one had ever written about that novel before; but secondary material should be deployed for the interpretation of the text, not paraphrased without reference to the text.
9. Use the cover sheet provided to show clearly on the front your name, the member of staff for whom it is intended, the module name and number, the date, and the full title of the essay.
10. Essays on different subjects may need to be organised in different ways; but few subjects can be handled satisfactorily without some kind of organisation. If the subject demands the presentation of a coherent argument, the stages of that argument should be carefully planned and clearly defined. An essay whose paragraphs could be rearranged without loss is almost certainly a weak essay.
11. The use of sub-headings is not usually appropriate in literary essays; but all essays should be divided into paragraphs, with the first line of each paragraph indented, i.e. begun a short distance in from the left-hand margin. This indentation is all that is needed to mark the division between paragraphs: do not leave a blank line between them. The divisions between paragraphs should correspond to meaningful divisions between sections of the essay's argument, and it is often helpful to use one sentence of a paragraph to define the paragraph's main substance.
You must use the presentation standards defined in the Part I handbook. You may use italic type to replace underlining to distinguish titles, but not for emphasis, which is better conveyed in formal writing by the rhythm of the sentence. Boldface type may be used for titles, but is not appropriate for the body of your text: do not, for example, use it t highlight key words.
12. Essays should be written in grammatical English, with due attention to correct spelling and punctuation. Where British and American conventions differ, British students should follow British conventions; but quotations from American books should be reproduced without emendation.
13. Unnecessary complications in sentence-structure should be avoided, as they often lead to confusion. Every sentence should have a principal clause, and should end with a full stop. All verbs should agree in number with their subjects. Care should be taken to use tenses with logical consistency, especially in reported speech: the correct form is "He said he would", not "He said he will".
14. In using participial phrases, one should ensure that they are so related to sentence-structure as to convey the meaning intended. One may write: "In reading Ulysses, we encounter many styles". One should not write: "In reading Ulysses many styles appear". The latter sentence implies that the styles are doing the reading.
15. Essays which are otherwise satisfactory are sometimes marred by numerous spelling mistakes. Most of these can be avoided with the aid of a good dictionary. Mistakes which have been corrected in one essay should not be repeated in subsequent essays.
16. Care should be taken to use punctuation marks correctly. Apostrophes are commonly used in abbreviations (she's, it's, we're, you're, they're). They are not used in possessive adjectives (its), and they are not used in pronouns (hers, ours, yours, theirs). The apostrophe in the possessive form of a noun is placed after the complete noun but before the s which forms the possessive; a dog's life, Poets' Corner, children's books. In the case of a name ending in a sibilant, the possessive is usually formed by adding 's if the name has one syllable and the apostrophe only if it has two or more syllables: Keats's poems, Dickens' novels. The forms Keat's and Dicken's, which sometimes occur in student essays, refer to authors named Keat and Dicken, whose status resembles that of Burn, Hopkin, Yeat, Thoma and Hughe.
17. Numbers which can be written in one or two words should be written in words: thirty-six, two million, eighteenth century. Other numbers should be written in figures: 21/2, 410, 1848. Dates should be given in a consistent form: 23 April 1564, 2 February 1882. The abbreviations B.C. and A.D., if they are required, should be placed after and before the dates respectively: 332 B.C., A.D. l4.
18. The titles of published books, plays, long poems and periodicals should be underlined, without quotation marks: Redgauntlet, Measure for Measure, The Prelude, Modern Language Review. The titles of essays, articles, chapters, short poems, short stories and dissertations should be placed within quotation-marks, underlining being used only for book- titles within article titles: "The Spoils of Poynton: James's Unintended Involvement", "The Tyger", "A Painful Case", "German Literature in Scotland 1750-1813". Titles of sacred writings, however, should be neither underlined nor placed within quotation marks: Old Testament, Ezekiel, Revelation, Koran, Upanishads.
19. In the titles of English works, capitals should be used for the initial letter of the first word and for the initial letters of all subsequent words other than articles, prepositions, conjunctions and the "to" of infinitives: The Way of the World, She Stoops to Conquer, Pride and Prejudice, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Titles in other languages should be capitalised on the principles used by writers of those languages: Le Medecin malgre lui, Die Leiden des jungen Werthers, La divina commedia.
20. All quotations, and all phrases drawn immediately from secondary sources, must be clearly identified. Unacknowledged transcription or paraphrase of secondary material constitutes plagiarism, and will be severely penalised. Plagiarism in assessment essays can lead to failure in the examinations.
21. Quotations should be transcribed exactly from the text being used, without normalisation or modernisation. Short quotations may be placed within quotation marks in the text. If the quotation is in verse, an oblique (/) should be used to indicate each new line. Quotations of more than three or four lines should be separated from the text and indented without quotation marks. If such quotations are in verse, the spatial arrangement of the original should be reproduced. An omission within a sentence should be indicated by three dots, an omission at the end of a sentence by four dots. Where a short quotation is being incorporated into a sentence of the essay, care should be taken to ensure that the resultant sentence is complete and correct. Long quotations should never be incorporated in this way.
22. Quotations and references should be followed in the text by numbers written or typed above the line, and the sources of such quotations and references should be given in numbered notes at the end of the essay. Where frequent references are made to a small number of texts, however, such references should be incorporated in the body of the essay in brackets, following the quotations. Upper-case Roman numerals (I, IV, XI) should be used for books of a poem, acts of a play, and volumes of a book. Lower-case Roman numerals (i, iv, xi) should be used for cantos of a poem, scenes of a play and chapters of the Bible. Arabic numerals (I, 4, 11) should be used for volumes of a periodical, and for the numbers of stanzas, lines, pages and biblical verses.
23. The following examples indicate some of the correct forms which endnotes may take:
a. Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1961), p.61.
b. Rene Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature, 3rd ed. (New York: Harcourt, 1962), p.289.
c. William R. Parker, Milton: A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon, 1968), I, 99-101.
d. Ama Ata Aidoo, "The Message" in Unwinding Threads: Writing by Women in Africa, ed. Charlotte H. Bruner. (London: Heinemann, 1983), pp.25-31.
e. Jarold W. Ramsay, "The Wife Who Goes Out Like a Man, Comes Back as a Hero: The Art of Two Oregon Indian Narratives", PMLA, 92 (1977), 15.
f. Samuel Johnson, 20 March 1776, as quoted in James Boswell, The Life of Johnson, ed. George Birkbeck Hill and L. F. Powell, II (Oxford: Clarendon, 1934), 450.
When a work has been fully identified in one note, it should be cited thereafter in shortened form:
g. Booth, p.89.
h. Wellek and Austin, pp. 39-43.
i. Parker, II, 17.
j. Aidoo, p.26.
Other systems of notation may be chosen, but whatever system is used should be used consistently.
24. The following abbreviations should be used in references to the plays of Shakespare: Err., LLL, 1H6, 2H6, 3H6, R3, Tit., Shr., TGV, Rom., R2, MND, Jn., MV, 1H4, 2H4, Ado, H5, JC, AYL, TN, Ham., Wiv., Tro., Aww, Oth., MM, Lr., Mac., Ant., Tim., Cor., Per., Cym., WT, Tmp., H8. References to The Faerie Queene and Paradise Lost should use the abbreviations FQ and PL respectively. Such abbreviations, however, should be used only in references.
Endnotes referring to the plays of Shakespeare should give the numbers of act, scene and line in that order:
k. LLL II. i. 14.
l. Oth. III. ii. 25.
m. WT IV. i. 17.
Endnotes referring to The Faerie Queene should give the numbers of book, canto, stanza and line in that order.
n. FQ I. ix. 43.2.
Endnotes referring to Paradise Lost should give the numbers of book and line in that order:
o. PL IX. 216.
26. A list of all the books and articles used should be provided at the end of every essay, under the heading 'Bibliography'. This list should be divided into Primary Sources (the texts under discussion and works contemporary with them) and Secondary Sources (works of scholarship and criticism). Within each section, items should be arranged in the alphabetical order of the author's names.
27. The following examples indicate one way in which bibliographical entries may be set out:
Booth, Wayne C. The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago: Univ of Chicago Press. 1961.
Parker, William R. Milton: A Biography. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon.
Wellek, Rene, and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature. 3rd ed. New York: Harcourt. 1962.
A bibliographical entry, unlike an endnote, should begin with the surname of the author or first author.
28. Accurate and well presented writing is obviously of great significance in a system which assesses coursework as part of the final degree result. This leaflet is intended to give you some basic advice: if you have any further questions you should ask your course tutor or seminar leader.
