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Old Friday, July 08, 2011
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Rough draft into fair copy
If time allows, you should write out your essay in a two-stage process. First, compose a provisional, but complete, draft of all that you intend to say. Think of this not as a 'rough copy' but as a 'working draft'. Do work at it, making additions, deletions and corrections as you write. Add relevant ideas. Cut obscurities and padding. Substitute clearer terms in which to convey your meaning.
A first draft allows you to make as many alterations as spring to mind without your being inhibited by the growing messiness. However inelegant this version may start to look as you cross out some words and squeeze in others, it will still be decipherable by you and only you need to see it.
When you have written out the last sentence of this working draft, read it all through from the beginning. Thoughtfully review and thoroughly revise. Try to find a friend or relative who is prepared to listen while you read it aloud, to ask questions where puzzled, and to offer constructive advice. At least try reading it aloud to yourself. Then you will be able to hear where it sounds confusing in structure or clumsy in style. When you can find no more opportunities for improvement or when there is simply no more time, write out the essay again as a fair copy.
Think of the adjective 'fair' here as a pun. Good-looking work may find favor. An essay which looks beautiful will not, of course, be forgiven for talking nonsense. Yet an ugly one may be thought to contain less sense than it in fact does.
Troubling to produce a fair copy also shows your sense of fair play. You are asking someone to help you. You want your criticism to be carefully studied. You want detailed advice on how it can be improved. So there is simple justice in being courteously considerate and providing an easily accessible route into your work.
In circumstances where there cannot be time for both a fun rough draft and a fair copy - examinations, for instance, - at least ensure that every word of the essay is legible.
Leave space for comments
Conventions of precisely how much space you should offer, and where, do vary. Find out what practice your tutor prefers. In all cases, there must be ample room for your reader to offer two different kinds of advice.
You should welcome specific comments about the more localized means and effects of your essay. So provide an extra margin throughout. If the paper which you are using has a printed margin, you could double it so that there is twice as much space on the left-hand side. Alternatively you could offer an extra margin on the right by stopping early on each line. Also, leave a space equivalent to two, or even three, lines at the foot of every page. This can then be used for lengthier comments on the material above.
At the end of the entire essay leave room for response to the work as a whole. Be optimistic. Allow one-third or even half of a page so that the tutor can easily offer as much constructive advice as time allows.
Titles of literary works
The title of any published book should be underlined. This is the hand-written equivalent of the printer's italics. So what you must write out as The Mill on the Floss, a printed essay would present as The Mill on the Floss. The rule applies not only to novels but also to any play, any work of discursive prose, any long poem or collection of shorter ones which, on its first publication, constituted a single, printed book.
Where a shorter work first appeared along with others as only one component of a volume, its title should not be underlined. Instead, it should be placed in single quotation marks. So the title of Blake's song about London is distinguished from the name of the city itself by being written as 'London'. In this case, the title which you should underline is Songs of Experience, the collection of poems among which 'London' was first printed.
Failure to underline the title of a major work can seriously mislead. Where you write of Hamlet or Robinson Crusoe or Don Juan, your reader must assume you to mean that fictional character. Only when underlined as Hamlet, Robinson Crusoe and Don Juan will they be seen as referring' to entire texts.
Place names too can confuse. If you mention Middlemarch, your reader will think that you mean the town in which George Eliot sets her novel. The novel itself is written as Middlemarch. So, too, Wuthering Heights and Bleak House are the names of houses. The texts which describe those houses are called Wuthering Heights and Bleak House.
To avoid confusion with underlined titles, you must not underline any of your own words or phrases for emphasis. Instead, indicate which should carry most weight by redesigning the syntax of your sentence.
For similar reasons, only the title of a short work or an actual quotation should be enclosed in quotation marks. These must not be used to apologize for any of your own terminology. If you are in doubt as to whether a word that you want to include is correct English or strictly accurate, pause. First try to find some expression which is undoubtedly appropriate and use that instead. If you cannot think of one and must settle for the dubious term, do not add quotation marks. Their defensiveness will merely draw attention to the vulnerable phrasing and virtually guarantee its being attacked.
Titles of scholarly and critical works
Titles of book-length works should again be underlined. So should the titles of periodicals. Titles of shorter essays and reviews which together compose a book or a periodical should not be underlined. They should be preceded and followed by a single quotation mark. So Marilyn Butler's book (on English literature and its background in the period 1760-1830) should be described as Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries. Her two-page review article (about books on Wordsworth) should, on the other hand, have its title placed in quotation marks: 'Three feet on the ground', London Review of Books, 14-20 April 1983. Note that the title of the journal in which the essay was published is underlined.
Quotations
Make sure that all your quotations are copied out with strict accuracy.
Sometimes, to increase economy and help your reader to concentrate upon what is most relevant to your present point, you may want to omit some portion of the original passage. If so, hesitate. Ensure that no significant misrepresentations will be involved. Where you decide to go ahead and make the omission, indicate it clearly with an ellipsis: three full stops preceded and followed by a space (...).
Try to be meticulous about punctuation, capital letters and spelling. The correct spelling is, of course, that adopted by the text, regardless of modern practice.
Accuracy is more important than any of the other rules about quotations which are given below. Where you break any of the following conventions about where and how to set out extracts on the page, you may seem ignorant of, or careless about, the formalities of literary criticism. But if you misquote, you will sound casual about literature itself. At worst, your reader may begin to wonder whether you are interested in discovering and expressing the truth.
There are two different formats by which to indicate that you are ceasing to write your own prose and are now reproducing an extract from a text. One is for a brief quotation: no more than twenty words of prose or two complete lines of verse. The other is for more substantial extracts.
Shorter quotations should be distinguished from your own prose simply by being enclosed in single quotation marks. In extracts from poems, line endings must be identified by an oblique stroke:
Byron's journals suggest impatience with modern poetry. Keats's verse, for instance, is disdained as 'a sort of mental masturbation' (Letters and Journals, Vol. VII, p. 225). Wordsworth, however, is a less dismissible enigma: a 'stupendous genius' if also a 'damned fool' (Vol. V, p. 13). In Childe Harolde, Byron himself tries out a word-sworthian pantheism: 'Are not the mountains, waves and skies, a part/Of me...?' (Canto BI, stanza 75). The question, however, may not be merely rhetorical. The Alpine landscape, only a few stanzas earlier, has been' said 'to show/How earth may pierce to Heaven, yet leave vain man below' (BI, 62).
A longer quotation is set clearly apart from your own sentences. The correct layout is that which I have just used above in quoting from an essay on Byron. The sentence which introduces the quotation should end in a colon. Then your pen should move down to a new line and write the first word of the quotation at least one inch further to the right than the margin you are using for your own prose. Every ensuing line of the quotation should be indented to this same extent. Each line should also end earlier than lines of your own prose. The quotation is thus framed by additional margins on both sides. Note that the first line of the above extract is no more indented than those that follow. This signals that the quotation does not begin at the point where the original text starts a new paragraph. Had.1 written the quotation's first word a little more to the right than the first word of the following lines, would have been claiming that the extract begins where the original text begins a fresh paragraph.
Where your substantial extract is from a work in verse, the lines will normally be short enough to create the extra space required on the right-hand side. Where they are not, maintain the space by writing out the last few words of each line just below:
As the husband is, the wife is: thou art mated with a clown,
And the grossness of his nature will have weight to drag thee down.
He will hold thee, when his passion shall have spent its novel force,
Something better than his dog, a1ittle dearer than his horse.
(Tennyson, 'Locksley Hall', II. 47-50)
You must reproduce the text's own typography as far as possible. In the example above, for instance, the poem inserts an extra space between each pair of rhyming lines. This may advise the reader on how to shape the poem, interpreting it as a series of couplets rather than some more seamless fabric. So, in quoting the four lines, I have reproduced the extra space between the second and third.
Reproduce the varying degrees of indentation which the text chooses to allocate to different lines:
"How strange is human pride!
I tell thee that those living things, To whom the fragile blade of grass, That springeth in the morn
And perisheth ere noon,
Is an unbounded world;
I tell thee that those viewless beings.
Whose mansion is the smallest particle Of the impassive atmosphere,
Think, feel and live like man;
That their affections and antipathies,
Like his, produce the laws Ruling their moral state; And the minutest throb
That through their frame diffuses The slightest, faintest motion, Is fixed and indispensable As the majestic laws
That rule yon rolling orbs."
(Shelley, Queen Mab, II. 225-43)
The double quotation marks here are reproduced from the text itself where they are used to denote that the lines are direct speech by one of the poem's characters. Never add any quotation marks of your own to extracts which are long enough to be set apart from your prose.
Identify the source of each quotation
Give a clear reference for even the briefest one-word quotation. Then, if the reader should doubt its accuracy or feel curious about its context, there will be precise guidance on where to find the relevant passage in the original text.
The reference for short quotations which are embedded in one of your own sentences can be placed either immediately after the quotation or at the end of the sentence. Enclose it in brackets. .
The reference for long, indented quotations must be given at the end of each extract. It should be bracketed and placed on a line of its own to the right-hand end.
In neither case are there any universally accepted, rigid rules about how full these references should be. However, the guidelines are these. Be accurate. Be clear. Be brief. Where you have not referred to a text before in the essay and it is not a well-known work, you may need to describe it almost as fully as is required for your formal bibliography. Far more often, you can provide sufficient guidance by just giving the number of a chapter, page or line.
If you look back to the above extract from an essay on Byron, you will see that the first quotation from Childe Harolde spells out what the numerals represent: 'Canto III, stanza 75'. This may be necessary as otherwise the reader might momentarily think that you mean line numbers. The second reference, however, can afford to gain the brevity of 'III, 62', relying on the reader to have understood that the roman numerals refer to cantos and the Arabic ones to stanzas.
Notice, too, that neither reference gives the title of the poem. This should always be included where there could be any doubt. Here there is none because, the first quotation is offered in a sentence beginning 'In Childe Harolde'. By' contrast in offering the quotation from Shelley's Queen Mab, I could not reasonably expect you to deduce from my context what work, or even what author, I would be quoting. My reference therefore supplies both, as well as identifying the passage's position in the text by line numbers.
For extracts from plays, it is safest to give the numbers of act, scene and lines. The act is identified first in large roman numerals (I, II, III, IV, V); then the scene in small roman numerals (i, ii, iii, iv, v, vi, vii, etc.) finally the line numbers in Arabic numerals: 'Lear himself has described the division of the kingdom as a "darker purpose" (I. ii. 36)'. Where your context leaves no possibility of doubt about which scene you mean, you can just identify the relevant line: 'In the very first scene of the play, Lear calls the division a "darker purpose" (36)'. If either of these sentences appears in an essay whose topic is clearly King Lear, the play's title need not be repeated within the reference.
You might, however, momentarily need to quote King Lear in an essay on some quite different work. Then the title, too, would need to be included in the reference:
Hardy's characters sometimes seem like the victims of some cosmic, practical joker. Tess of the D'Urbervilles remorselessly teases and tortures its heroine until the very last page. It is only in the closing paragraph that 'The President of the Immortals' is said to have finished his 'sport' with Tess. She has at last escaped further torment by being killed. Hardy's zestfully bitter image recalls some of Shakespeare's bleakest lines: 'As flies to wanton boys, are we to th' Gods;/They kill us for their sport' (King Lear, IV. i. 36-7).
Note that the quotation from Hardy's own text is here given no reference. The context guides the reader unmistakably to Tess of the D'Urbervilles and to that novel's 'last paragraph'
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