Paper-writing basics

An introductory note: the most basic thing you need to remember to do is save and back up all your work frequently! Keep a copy on a hard drive or your G drive, in addition to any portable media you may be using. Never rely on a single file. If you’re writing longhand or typing, keep a xeroxed hard copy for yourself. In addition, save your drafts and outlines, at least until after the course is over. YOU are responsible, ultimately, for getting your work in fully and on time, and “my computer ate it”—even if true, sadly—is not an adequate excuse for missing work.

When submitting work electronically, moreover, do not assume that it has been received until and unless I confirm that I’ve gotten it. That is an absolute rule: if you have no confirmation from me, I have no paper.

The following guide may seem like overkill, but I’m just trying to cover all the bases. Most of this comes out of questions students have asked in the past, so think of this as a FAQ sheet. A lot of what I include you may have heard from other professors or teachers; some of it’s peculiar to me. In terms of my own essay requirements, please pay particular attention to the first six mechanical guidelines—they make my life much easier. And a happier professor is a kinder professor…
Mechanics

1) With rare exceptions, I expect all papers to be submitted to me electronically—which means, in case there was any doubt, they have to be word-processed. Double-space and leave decent margins, so I have room to write comments. Use a font about the same size as this (12 pt.). Please avoid sans serif fonts (like Avant Garde or Helvetica)— they’re difficult to read; Palatino’s nice, as is New Century Schoolbook. Times is fine, but you’ll probably want to use a larger point size—it’s really small.

2) Papers should be submitted as attachments in Apple’s Pages program (from iWork) or in Microsoft Word. In the latter, either a .doc or a .docx file type is fine. If you hate Microsoft, just take a deep breath and remind yourself of the multiple billions of dollars the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has devoted to education and world health.

3) Don’t assume that if you fill up the right number of pages, you’ve got the right length paper: fonts vary hugely, even if the variation doesn’t seem noticable to you. For consistency’s sake, I always check the actual word count of essays turned in (Hint: this means you should, too). Assume about 350 words per page—which probably means your paper is shorter than you think.

4) Begin the first page of the essay with a meaningful title (not just the title of the text(s) you’re writing on). If you’re turning in the paper as a hard copy, at the END of the paper, put a separate identifying sheet with your name, the course title or number, and the date. Don’t put your name anywhere else in the paper—I try to read and grade anonymously.

If you’re submitting the paper electonically, you can skip the identifying end sheet: I can figure out who you are via your e-mail address.

5) Number your pages. Please do this through the page-numbering command in your word-processor.

6) If you’re working on a computer, use the spell-checker. WHETHER OR NOT you’re using a spell-checker, proof-read your final copy before you turn it in. For a quick and insightful view into the importance of proofing, you might want to watch this video.

7) All the basic rules of grammar apply.
If you’re in doubt about what these rules are, consult one of the many guides available to you at the library or in the bookstore. On-line guides also exist: one linked to the St. Mary’s library website is http://webster.commnet.edu/grammar/index.htm. I can’t vouch for this particular guide, as I haven’t used it, but whoever put together the library page seems to think it’s worthwhile.

8) Please note that titles of novels and plays (as well as any other whole books or journals) are italicized, like this: The Big Sleep. Don’t underline titles: underlining is simply a convention left over from typewriters, and actually serves as an instruction for typesetters to set the finished text in italics.

With a few rare exceptions (generally book-length poems), poem and short story titles, as well as essay titles, are put inside quotation marks, like this: “A Lesson in Anatomy.”

Quoting from a literary text (and citing what you quote) 


Principles of proper citation

You know that when you write any kind of researched paper and either directly quote from, paraphrase, or include information you learned from a specific source, you have to provide a footnote. When you’re writing about literature, you’ll be quoting frequently from the specific work(s) you’re writing on—and even though it may be obvious that all your quotations come from, say, The Big Sleep, you must provide specific page numbers so that a reader can find the appropriate spot in the book.

Give citations like this: “the cat sat on the mat” (5). Note carefully the placement of quotation marks, parenthetical page number, and final punctuation. Within the parentheses, you should give page numbers for prose, and line numbers for poetry. For plays, it gets a little more complicated: with Shakespeare, give act, scene, and line numbers (like this: IV, i, 5); for my courses, modern plays may be treated like novels, with just the page numbers cited. You do not need to include “p.” or “page” or “line”—just the number is sufficient.

• When quoting prose or drama, if the quote runs from one page (or line) to another of the original text, do this: “the cat sat on the mat” (5–6).

• When quoting poetry, if your quote includes more than one line of the poem, do this: “The cat/Sat on the mat” (5–6).

• If you are using the quote somewhere other than the end of one of your sentences, don’t put the page number until the end, like this: “the cat sat on the mat” is a trite and stupid phrase (5–6).

• If the quote takes up more than about 3 lines of your paper, or if you’re quoting more than 3 lines of poetry, make it a block quote:
the cat sat on the mat, creating a graceful picture
of serenity and repose in the middle of an otherwise
dull and dreary day. (5–6)

Notice that the quote is indented twice what you’d use to indent the first line of a paragraph; that it’s single-spaced, although set off from the material immediately before and after it with a double space; that no quotation marks are put around it; and that the final period lands before the parenthetical page numbers.

• A note about quoting speech from books: in order to avoid confusion, you should use double quotes (“) to mark off the entire passage of quoted material from your own writing, and single quotes (‘) to set off speech within the selection, even it’s set off in the novel by double quotes. This rule actually applies any time you’re quoting material that itself contains quotation marks—not only quoted speech. Thus, a passage in your paper might look like this:

As the writing instructions point out, “‘the cat sat on the mat’ is a trite and stupid phrase” (5–6).

If the entire substance of your quote is quoted speech, and the way you incorporate it into your essay makes this clear, there’s no need to include nested single and double quotation marks. So, your essay would look like this:

When Billy says “the cat sat on the mat,” he’s expressing a particular form of existential angst.

as opposed to:

When Billy says “‘the cat sat on the mat,’” he’s expressing a particular form of existential angst.

Streamlining your quotations

Generally speaking, you shouldn’t use a quotation as a stand-alone sentence—always include some of your own words. When you incorporate material as a run-in quotation (as opposed to a block quote), the ideal is to have it fit into your own prose as seamlessly as possible. Sometimes this will mean that you chop a longer quotation into smaller bits, interspersing them with your own words. Sometimes you might subtly alter or edit a quotation, so that it matches your sentence grammatically.

Note—you’re not allowed to alter the quoted material so as to change its meaning in any way! Usually you’d add or change words in order to clarify (such as replacing pronouns with proper names) or to make the verb tense consistent with the tense your paper is written in.

• If you add to or alter material in the quote, to make it fit better in the context you are placing it in put the added material inside brackets, like this: “[Henry’s] cat sat on a mat” (5–6). Or “the cat [sits] on the mat” (5–6).

Don’t use bracketed to supplement what’s already there (for example, “He [Henry] has a lazy cat”); instead, simply replace (“[Henry] has a lazy cat”).

• If you are editing material from the middle of the quote, replace it with ellipses: “the cat…the mat” (5–6). OK—so that’s a weird example, but sometimes it works. Say the original was, “the cat stretched gracefully then sat on the mat:” it becomes, “the cat…sat on the mat” (5–6). You don’t need to use ellipses at the beginning or end of a quote, even if you quote only part of a sentence—it’s understood that you’re probably not quoting the entire book. Nor should you be.
The one exception I can think of to this rule is that if your quotation ends with a period, comma, semicolon, or colon, and you’re putting it in the middle of one of your own sentences, drop or alter the concluding punctuation. For example, “The book ends with the resounding words, ‘The End,’ letting us know that it has concluded” (as opposed to “The book ends with the resounding words, ‘The End.’ letting…”).
Research and Plagiarism

Generally, I prefer that students not do secondary research for literary criticism papers at the introductory level, and I expect it for upper-level classes. If you have any doubts as to whether or not research is appropriate or recommended for a particular assignment, please check with me before beginning your work. If you do any research at all—and that includes Googling the name of a poem you’re writing on and looking at a few websites—you must include a bibliography. I realize that, given the way electronic research goes nowadays, this can be pretty cumbersome; you should thus not feel it necessary to list webpages that were total dead-ends. Any site that you actually find at all useful, though, should be cited. And if you incorporate any ideas from your research—whether directly quoted, paraphrased, or otherwise incorporated into your analysis—you must footnote the material.

Don’t plagiarize. Period.

I take plagiarism extremely seriously. Intellectual theft robs the original author of his or her work; you of the learning you’re supposed to be here for; your classmates of the chance to have their work evaluated on a level playing field; and me of a tremendous amount of time and energy. Read the section on academic honesty in the student handbook (“Student code of rights and responsibilities,” Article III, p.5) and familiarize yourself with its provisions. If you have any questions, talk to me before turning in your written work—and this means leaving enough time before a due date to be sure you can reach me. A failing grade for the semester is the minimum penalty for plagiarism in any of my courses.

I both do and don’t want to sound draconian about this. If you are honest, and diligent about tracking your sources, I’m not going to hang you for a misplaced comma. But if you copy so much as a sentence from a secondary source without attribution, expect no mercy.

If you have no intention of directly copying from a source, but have done secondary research and aren’t sure how to reasonably use what you’ve learned in your paper, you may find the following sites helpful:

“Advice for Students on Citation and Scholarship” by Judy Hunter, Director of the Writing Lab at Grinnell College
“Exercise on Citation and Paraphrase” by Judy Hunter
And, from the Library of Congress, guidelines for citing all kinds of non-standard sources: http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/ndlpedu/start/cite/index.html

Content & Structure

1) Your paper must have a thesis, and it must have a statement of that thesis in its introduction. A thesis is different from a topic. A topic is what your paper’s about; a thesis is the point you want to make about your topic. Think of your paper as an argument: the thesis is your point of view.

You may say to yourself, “I’m going to write about all the times in this book the cat sits on the mat”; that’s fine—that’s your topic. Now, what do you want to say about it, other than that it happens? Why does it happen? What does it symbolize? Why should we care? “The repeated motif of the cat sitting on the mat in this book is part of an overall theme about the impossibility of separating nature from culture”: that would be a thesis. It’s an assertion, a point of view, which must be argued using textual evidence (quotes).

2) Your paper must have evidence. You draw this evidence from the text(s) you’re writing about. A typical paragraph in your paper might begin with a topic sentence—a statement of the small subset of your argument that you’re going to tackle. You then quote a passage or passages from the book that support your contention, interspersing and following them with YOUR EXPLANATION of how and why they help you make your case. Finally, you restate and amplify (ideally, in different words) the point you just proved. Please note that this is a fairly programmatic description of a paragraph, and that you actually have a lot of freedom to deviate from it; it’s not a bad place to start from, however.

The way you use textual evidence is important. Select your quotations with care. Do they really illustrate the point you wish to make? Would different quotes be better? Next, you must remember to explain why the quote illustrates your point—don’t assume it’s obvious. Authors can’t do your work for you: they write the literature, and you write the literary criticism. Thus my earlier point that you should never have a sentence that’s entirely a quotation.

Finally, beware of quoting material that simply serves as a form of plot summary. Here’s an example:

The week after Sylvie arrives, the town of Fingerbone floods: “So at the end of three days the houses and hutches and barns and sheds of Fingerbone were like so many spilled and foundered arks” (61). People’s houses are in disorder and many are destroyed.

The fact that the town floods is a matter of fact: it occupies an entire chapter of the novel, and you don’t need to quote from the text to prove that the flood occurs. But look at the passage you’ve quoted! It says a lot more than “it flooded,” doesn’t it? What words jump out at you—words that are worthy of explanation and exploration? Imagine this passage instead as part of a paragraph like the following:

The flood that coincides with Sylvie’s arrival in Fingerbone is a natural disaster, certainly, but it’s also imagined as supernatural, or larger-than-life: “So at the end of three days the houses and hutches and barns and sheds of Fingerbone were like so many spilled and foundered arks” (61). People’s houses are in disorder and many are destroyed, and this destruction—more than merely inconvenient—has religious overtones. Noah’s Ark saves him and the earth’s animals from God’s wrath…

In this second example the paper-writer, rather than rehearsing first-order facts (there’s a flood), instead tells us what the flood might mean, at a symbolic or thematic level. To do this, it usually helps to delve into the author’s language in some detail, noticing things like word choice (“arks” — or “spilled,” or…).

3) Your paper must be written in coherent paragraphs. Every paragraph gets a new idea, and every new idea gets a paragraph. The definition of “new idea” is somewhat flexible: if a paragraph gets to be more than about 2/3 of a page long, it’s going to be hard for a reader to follow your thought process. Thus, you need to think about ways to logically subdivide the idea.

4) Avoid plot summary. I’ve read the books; I don’t need to be told what happens when.

5) Conversely, I do need to be given some hints as to what’s going to happen when in your paper. Your paper should have some clear organizational scheme—ideally, one that is driven by your idea, rather than by the plot or chronology of the work you’re writing about. Use your introduction to describe the shape of your argument, then follow through with what you’ve promised.

5) Generally, you won’t introduce evidence in either your introduction or your conclusion. These are paragraphs where you flex your rhetorical muscles, rather than demonstrate your detective ability.

6) Try to break the paper up into chunks. This will both help you to write it, and help me to read it. Think of a 5-page paper as a 4-pager with a half-page introduction, and a half-page conclusion. Think of the middle 4 pages as 3 or 4 smaller units of writing. These smaller units should all be interrelated—they should build upon and support each other—but each should also be doing its own thing. They’re like chapters in a book. This isn’t a hard and fast rule, but it’s a reminder to beware of rambling.

Style

1) While it’s generally wise to avoid colloquialisms, it’s also important to avoid sounding too stilted. A lot of people think they have to write in a ‘formal’ voice completely different from the way they speak: the result is often a painfully convoluted mish-mash of words. Clarity and simplicity are key. A good way of checking your prose is to say what you want to say out loud, as though you were explaining it to a friend, and then compare it to what you’ve written. Is it drastically different? It probably shouldn’t be. Clean up the grammar, eliminate all the little ticks like “um” and “like” we all stick in, and chances are what you said is clearer than what you’ve written. Now try to write it down.

2) Avoid book review lingo. “This is an excellent book for children or adults,” “I liked this poem,” “Shakespeare is widely acknowledged to be the greatest English author in history, and this play demonstrates why,” etc.

3) While you want to be explicit about what points you’re trying to make, you should try to avoid being explicit about the mechanics you use to make them. For example, rather than introducing a quote with the rather stilted “in the book it states,” or “in the following quote, I will demonstrate my point,” try to say something qualitative to introduce the quotation: “In Billy’s small universe, cats are shown to be passive and addicted to comfort: ‘the cat sat on the mat’ (5–6).”

4) Write in the present tense. It’s a convention of writing about literature: “The cat sits on the mat for much of the first chapter of the book, only getting up to taunt the dog in passing” (as opposed to “The cat sat on the mat for…”).


A Final Note

I said this before; I’ll say it again: SAVE AND BACK UP ALL YOUR WORK FREQUENTLY! Keep a copy on a hard drive or your G drive, in addition to any portable media you may be using. Always make sure two copies of your writing exist at any given moment. On the off chance that you’re typing, keep a xeroxed hard copy for yourself. In addition, save your drafts and outlines, at least until after the course is over.

Pencil image courtesy of Trish Harvey at designkitten.com. Gear image part of the Illinois Gear Collection, at Cornell University; found through fabathome.org. Barn image courtesy of The New Jersey Barn Company, njbarnco.com. Fashion plate courtesy of Dover Books.