View Single Post
  #4  
Old Tuesday, May 29, 2007
M.A.N's Avatar
M.A.N M.A.N is offline
Member
 
Join Date: Sep 2005
Location: Lahore
Posts: 67
Thanks: 38
Thanked 126 Times in 37 Posts
M.A.N will become famous soon enough
Default

PART-4

TWO MORE EXAMPLES OF BAD WRITING
Bad thing: What’s wrong with it?:
The film was criticised for it’s drug-taking, violence, etc.
! You only put an apostrophe in “it’s” where you are using it as an abbreviation of
“it is” (e.g. “it’s a great film”).

! The writer should really have put “…criticized for its depictions of drug-taking…” – otherwise the reader might wrongly infer that the production of the film involved actual drug-taking and violence, for example.
! The use of ‘etc.’ shows that the writer wanted to suggest that the film had been criticized for other things, but hadn’t got a clue what these were. It’s better to simply say: “The film was criticized for its depictions of drug-taking and violence”.

The theory was very popular, Foucault was said to be ‘more popular than the Beatles’. ! Two units of meaning – parts that could stand alone as sentences, such as “The theory was very popular” – cannot just be strung together with a comma in the middle. In this case, the comma could be replaced with a full stop, or a semi-colon (which represents a more emphatic pause than a comma, and suggests a connection
between the material before and after it). Or add a connecting word: “The theory was very popular, and Foucault was said to be ‘more popular than the Beatles’”. ! You want a reference for that quote, of course, too.

References
As you may know, there are a range of different ways of writing references. Some of them involve using footnotes, or having separate lists called ‘References’ and ‘Bibliography’, and generally give you a headache. We therefore recommend the ‘Harvard’ system of referencing, which is straightforward, and widely-used by publishers and academics. THE HARVARD REFERENCE SYSTEM It’s quite simple. When you quote or paraphrase something, you cite the author’s last name, the year of publication, and the page reference, in brackets. For example: The popularity of baked beans soared when Elvis Presley was seen to eat six whole tins on Entertainment Tonight in 1959 (Heinz, 2000: 34).
At the end of the essay you then include a ‘References’ section which must include every item you’ve referred to in the essay. If there are two or more works by an author published in the same year, distinguish them as 2000a, 2000b, and so on. References are written in the following style:

Type of reference: Example of reference:


Book Heinz, Edward (2000) A History of Baked Beans, London: Arnold.
Article in book Johnson, Sarah (1998a) ‘The Cornflake in History’ in Norman Jennings (ed.)
Food for Thought, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Article in journal Johnson, Sarah (1998b) ‘Deconstructing the pre-millennial diet: Special K and
postmodernism’, Cultural Studies 11, 1: 32–44.

Explanation: This means that an article by Sarah Johnson called ‘Deconstructing the pre-millennial
diet: Special K and postmodernism’ was published in the journal Cultural Studies,
volume 11, number 1, on pages 32 to 44. This issue of the journal was published in 1998.
The piece is listed here as ‘(1998b)’ since it’s the second of two articles by Sarah Johnson,
which we are referring to, published in 1998.

Article in newspaper
Ratner, Clifford (2000) ‘Magazine sparks love feud’, The Independent,
10 October 2000, Thursday Review section: 14.
Article from the internet

Wherever possible, identify the author, so you can have a reference like this:
Holmes, Amy (2000), ‘Greenpeace wins media war’, at http://www.independent.
co.uk/international/green25.htm (accessed: 25 November 2000).
Always state the date you visited the site. If you can’t state the author, have a reference like this:
BBC Online (2000) ‘Radical autumn shake-up’, at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/
10276.htm (accessed: 8 December 2000).
__________________
"A soldier will fight long and hard for a bit of colored ribbon". Napoleon Bonaparte
Reply With Quote
The Following 5 Users Say Thank You to M.A.N For This Useful Post:
dr-shoaib (Wednesday, December 09, 2009), étoile brillante (Tuesday, November 22, 2016), Malik Iqbal (Friday, November 22, 2013), MoonSaghar (Sunday, October 07, 2012), Mystichina (Thursday, March 19, 2009)