The Good Writing Guide

INTRODUCTION

Good writing is important. The ability to write clear and accurate text is
the most useful skill that you will learn at university. Whatever subject
you specialise in, and whatever career you choose after you graduate, a
command of language is a valuable asset. When employers offer a job to
an MA graduate they are sometimes interested in how much he or she
knows about Charles Dickens or the Napoleonic wars, but they are
always looking for someone with good communication skills and an eye
for detail. In almost any job, you will spend time working with a range of
texts. You may produce written reports, letters or marketing copy. You
may also give lectures or presentations. If you are aiming for a career in
which you can use language stylishly, such as journalism or creative
writing, it is equally important that you know the rules of good plain
English.

This guide will help you to think about how you write. It will also
improve your reading skills. While you are a student you will often be a
reader, absorbing information from other sources or analysing the
structure of a text. When assessments come along, you will be a writer,
and someone else will read and analyse your work. Reading and writing
are closely connected. Improving your skills in one area will have a
knock-on effect in the other. Set yourself high standards in both these
areas. One of the simplest ways to improve your own writing is to read
widely and to look at how authors mould the language to their own
purposes. Try to develop an eye for style and sentence structure as you
read. This will help you to assess your own writing and expand your
language skills.

While you are at university, ‘good writing’ means being able to

produce a clear, grammatical, logical argument to answer a question in
an exercise, an essay or an exam. This is not the place to be innovative
or poetic. Chances to be creative with language are available elsewhere.
Academic writing should be clear, clean and correct. It should display
your knowledge and express your ideas. Good writing is always aimed at
a particular audience. Your audience is the tutor (or tutors) who will mark
your work. Your tutors will be highly qualified, and are likely to be the
kind of people who have an obsessive interest in grammar and spelling.
They will consider a command of language as important as any ideas

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you might want to share. In the School of Language and Literature, tutors
are allowed to deduct up to four marks for poor spelling, punctuation and
presentation. That is the difference between a first-class mark and a 14.
If your grammar is so poor that it obscures your argument, you may fail
the assessment. Markers cannot give credit for what they think you might
have wanted to say. What is on the paper is all that counts. Good writing
is not an optional extra to a degree; it is the core of the education
system. Make this your primary goal at university. Everything that you
study can be channelled towards making yourself a more perceptive
reader and a more accurate writer. Get this right and you will understand
more of what you read. You will also be able to express your own ideas
with force and clarity.

This guide is available online. You can also print out a copy and
keep it lying around, so that you can dip into it when you need it.

Section A contains advice on reading a text for analysis, and on setting

up your answer to a question. It looks at planning, structure and
paragraphing, and it explains some technical terms.

Section B deals with language. It highlights some common problems,

and it offers advice on how to sharpen up your prose. It will also explain
some terms markers may use when giving feedback about your writing.

Section C deals with using sources. It explains referencing and how to

use critical material. Different disciplines use different referencing
systems. So, check with your tutor in advance which system they would
like you to use. In Section C you will find advice on two referencing
systems, MHRA and Harvard. MHRA (subsection 13) is a footnotes
system, widely used in arts and humanities subjects. All the references in
the earlier sections of the guide are given in MHRA, so that you can see
it in practice. Harvard (subsection 14) is an author-date system, widely
used in social sciences and some science subjects.

At the end of each of the main sections you will find a Quick-Fix
page with a summary of the most important points presented at a glance.
Use these as checklists every time you submit a piece of written work.
Each section also has some recommended further reading. At the back
of the booklet there is an index so that you can find things in a hurry, or
look up terms that may be confusing in the feedback from your marker.
Many of the points have been numbered so that your marker can point
you to the relevant section when things go wrong.

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If, after all that, you would like some more advice about good writing
there are several things you can do:

— Consult your tutor. This is one of the reasons that tutors have office
hours, and it is remarkable how few students take advantage of this
opportunity for some individual advice. Remember to reread your tutor’s
comments on your previous essay before you write the next one.

— Make an appointment to see the School’s Writing Support tutor. If you

have been referred for Writing Support by your tutor this is particularly
important. Consultation is on a one-to-one basis and is designed to help.
Contact the School Office for details.

— Contact the Student Learning Services, Regent Building, Tel: 273030,

or visit www.abdn.ac.uk/sls/ to find some helpful advice online. SLS run
workshops and courses on study skills and can also offer individual
consultations.

— Use your own network. Ask a friend or flatmate to proofread your work
before you hand it in. So long as they do not change the content or
borrow your ideas this is not cheating. Choose someone you can really
trust. A friend on a different course is ideal. You can return the favour
and improve your own proofreading skills. This is excellent practice for a
career in marketing, publishing or journalism. Develop an interest in
writing, and discuss with your friends what works and what does not.
This is one of the best ways to learn.

— Buy some useful books. Some of the material which I originally used
for this booklet has now been developed for a larger book which has
more advice on planning, writing and referencing called Write Great
Essays and Dissertations (London: Hodder, 2010). You may find this
helpful, especially if you are taking courses beyond the School of
Language and Literature. Alternatively, the lists of Further Reading at the
end of each section and the Reference List on pages 66-67 will give you
some other ideas.

Write well.

Dr Hazel Hutchison, September 2013

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CONTENTS

Section A: Planning
1. Reading for writing 6
2. Reading the question 7
Question busting 8
3. Structure: 10
Making a plan 10
Introductions and conclusions 11
Subheadings 13
Paragraphs 13
4. Layout 14
5. Submitting Your Work 15
Further Reading 16
Quick Fix: Planning 17

Section B: Language
6. Register 18
7. Punctuation: 19
Apostrophes 20
Commas 21
Semi-colons 26
Colons 27
Dashes 28
Quotation marks 29
Exclamation marks 29
8. Grammar: 30
Clauses 30
Agreement 34
Tenses 36
Pronouns 37
9. Spelling: 38
Common errors 39
Capitals 39
US v UK spelling 40
Further Reading 41
Quick Fix: Language 42

Section C: Sources
10. Choosing sources 43
11. Using sources 45
12. Layout of quotations 46

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13. Referencing with MHRA(footnotes) 50
14. Referencing with Harvard (author-date) 55
15. Plagiarism 61
Quick-Fix: Sources 65
Further Reading 66

Index 68

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 SECTION A: PLANNING

1. READING FOR WRITING

Everyone has their own way of approaching a text when working on an

assignment. Some people like to take meticulous notes as they go along.
Others prefer to read through swiftly to get a general sense of the text
and then return to look at it more closely. Develop your own style of
reading. However, here are a few things to remember.

Keep an open mind: One of the most valuable things you can learn as
you study is the ability to suspend your own preconceptions as you read.
Learning to see things from different perspectives is a vital part of the
reading process. Do not attempt to make a text fit your own agenda as
you go along, or dismiss it because it challenges what you believe. You
do not have to agree with the text, but give it a chance to speak for itself.
If you react strongly to something, try to work out why.

Think about language: It is easy to be carried away by an intriguing plot

or an interesting set of characters. But keep one eye open for the
language the author uses. This is especially important in poetry, where
the words work harder. Develop an eye for style. What makes Austen
different from Hemingway, or Tennyson different from Plath? What kind
of words do they choose? Do they use a lot of adjectives or a lot of
verbs? Is their language formal or colloquial? Is their language abstract
and philosophical or concrete and particular? Does it fit the historical
context of the text, or challenge this? These simple questions give you
an insight into the author’s underlying concerns and preoccupations.
Language does more than tell a story. It creates a world of ideas. What
makes a degree in literature really worth having is an understanding of
how this process operates. Do not just look at what the text says. Try to
work out how it conveys ideas and elicits certain responses.

Think about structure: This will depend on what kind of text you are
reading. The rules of form for fiction, poetry and drama are constantly
evolving. However, it helps to have some idea of conventions and
techniques, so that you can see when something interesting or unusual
is happening. Compare the text to what you already know about sonnets,
or Jacobean plays or Victorian novels, or whatever you happen to be
reading. Ask yourself how the text is put together and whether it seems
to be following a convention or defying it. If something jars, or seems out
of place, there may be a good reason for this. Explore it.

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Read between the lines: Be careful about this, because you could end
up supplying a whole heap of ideas that the text does not support.
However, authors often manipulate the unspoken and the unseen as
carefully as the things which they tell. Pay special attention when
characters refuse to answer questions or disappear for a few chapters or
scenes. Who is off stage when something interesting happens? Is the
narrator holding back information that the reader wants? Is there another
way of viewing the events in the story?

Take notes: This is obvious, but vital. If you see something interesting or
have a good idea, write it down and note the page number, or use sticky
notes. You will save hours trying to find it again later.

2. READING THE QUESTION

The easiest way to fail an assessment is not to answer the question.

Make sure you understand what the question is looking for. Be especially
careful if the question includes literary terms such as ‘form’ or ‘genre’ or
‘realism’. These sometimes mean slightly different things to different
people or in different contexts. If you are unclear about this you can
discuss it with your tutor and clarify exactly what they want, or look it up.
However, as these words are being used in very specific ways, a
dictionary may not help. A book such as M. H. Abrams, A Glossary of
Literary Terms will be much more useful. There are copies in the Library.
Make it clear in your essay exactly how you are using the term, and back
this up with an outside source if possible.

Think about the kind of course to which the assessment belongs.

Tutors are usually looking for a response to, or an application of, ideas
covered in the course. Think back to what has been done in lectures and
seminars. Was the course more focused on historical context or
technical analysis? Did it encourage use of theoretical ideas or
knowledge of the author’s experience and concerns? Look in the course
guide to remind yourself about the main themes and objectives of the
course. Choose a question that will allow you to show off what you have
learned. In an exam you will not have time to go and look these things
up, so spend some time thinking about this as you revise for the exam.

It is often worth considering more than one question while you are
doing some background reading for an essay. You can then choose the
one that you find most interesting or stimulating as you go along. This

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way you avoid heading up a blind alley and then having to start all over
again. Keep your question in mind as you write. Everything you say
should be connected to it. Avoid rambling. You will not get credit for
including irrelevant information, however interesting you may think it is.
Answer the question.

Question busting

Like any academic subject, the study of literature has its own technical
language, which you need to learn. However, this vocabulary also
includes some everyday terms which are often used to particular
purposes in essay questions. Make sure you understand exactly what
they mean before you start. Here are a few to look out for.

Form: This is a very wide-ranging term. Usually it either means the kind
of text you are dealing with, (sonnet, dramatic monologue, novel, short
story, comic drama etc) or the internal structure of the text (a play in
three acts, a first-person narrative, an Italian sonnet of eight lines
followed by six all in iambic pentameter). Sometimes it means the
thematic movement of a text (three sections focusing on love, grief,
regret). If you are uncertain what is required, ask your tutor.

Critical analysis aka practical criticism: A tightly focused breakdown

of a set passage, looking at language, stylistic technique and form (see
above). Use fewer secondary sources for this, but make sure you know
and understand some technical terms before you start. This is the
hardest kind of essay to do well. A good one is a thing of great beauty
and will be rewarded accordingly.

Comparative essay: If you write on more than one text, do not just talk
about one and then the other. Draw connections and comparisons
between them. A good way to make this happen is to structure your
essay around several things they have in common and to keep both texts
in play as you go.

Theory/theoretical issues: This does not invite you to form a theory

about a text. It almost certainly means literary critical theory (ie.
something about theories of reading and writing by Barthes, Derrida,
Cixous, Butler etc). If you do not know who these people are or what I
am talking about, do not attempt the question. However, if you do, and if
it is relevant, some theory will give an essay weight and bite. Theoretical
texts invite you to develop different ways of reading, which can make for
radical and exciting work.

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Voice: This usually refers to who is speaking in the text and to the
language they adopt. It is often used in questions about poetry. It invites
a discussion of the poem’s speaker. Consider what sort of situation the
poem implies as a setting or background to the poem as well as the
personality and emotional state of the speaker. In fiction this is usually
called narrative voice. In both cases you should consider whether the
speaking voice is inside the fictional world or a detached observer
looking on. Beware of equating the narrator with the author. An author
assumes different voices when writing, although these are often mixed
up with elements of their own personality. It is hard to untangle this
neatly, so it is safer to discuss the ‘speaker’ or the ‘narrator’.

Point of View aka perspective: This refers to the standpoint of the

narrator of a story or the speaker of a poem. The question here is who is
seeing the story? Does the narrator see everything and tell all? Are they
omniscient? Or do they view events through the eyes of one of the
characters at a time and give a limited perspective? A good yardstick for
this is how much you are told about the characters’ internal thoughts and
feelings. ‘Point of view’ does not refer to the personality or political
opinions of the narrator or the characters — although this is often
connected. Sometimes ‘point of view’ is called ‘focalisation’ as the
reader’s view is focused through one character. Pay special attention
when this shifts between characters.

Tragedy/tragic: This is not just looking at sad events and the emotions
they elicit. ‘Tragic’ invites some sort of comparison with the conventions
of dramatic tragedy. Think about Sophocles, Shakespeare and Marlowe,
rather than The Evening Express.

Gender: This usually refers to social expectations about how men and
women should behave, rather than simply which sex a person is
biologically.

Irony: This is much more than sarcasm. Irony derives from the Greek
word for ‘dissembler’. Dramatic irony involves one or more characters
being excluded from knowledge which another character shares with the
audience. In Hamlet, for example, the audience knows Ophelia is dead
before Hamlet does. Generally in literature ‘irony’ implies some kind of
hidden knowledge or concealed intent. It is not always comic, but it can
also be used for comic effect. Sometimes the narrator adopts an ironic
tone, inviting the reader to question what the text appears to be saying.
The opening line of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice is an excellent
example of this:

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 It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in
possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.1

It is really? Or is the narrator making fun of people who think this?

3. STRUCTURE

Markers often complain about poorly structured essays, but by then it is

too late to do anything about it. Bad structure in an essay is usually the
result of a failure to read the question carefully, a lack of understanding
of the subject, or a rushed job. Taking time to plan out your work helps in
many ways. It ensures that you connect your essay with the question. It
reduces the stress of writing, as you know where you are going next. It
produces a well-rounded piece of writing.

3.1 Making a plan

However you like to take notes and marshal your ideas, at some point
you are going to need a linear plan for your essay. It is always worth
doing this, especially in exams when time is tight and nerves are likely to
make you forget a good idea which seemed very clear fifteen minutes
ago. The classic layout for an essay is an introduction, followed by three
sections, followed by a conclusion. This is based on the rules of
Classical rhetoric, in which the speaker offered an introduction, a
statement, a counterstatement, a resolution between the two and a
conclusion. There is not a set rule about this, but this tried and tested
system works well and usually produces a satisfying read. In literature
essays, this plan often evolves into an introduction, three sections
dealing with relevant themes and a final section tying these together.
But, remember that you are not just making lists of what you know. You
are answering a question and the whole thing should form a logical
argument.

A plan should operate as a skeleton for your essay. Ideally it

should be possible for a reader to reconstruct your plan from the finished
article. This is basically what you are doing when you take lecture notes.
Paying attention to how this process works will make planning your own
written work a lot easier. Most lecturers think carefully about how they
want to present material to the class. It might seem random, but if you

1
Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813; repr. London: Penguin, 1996), p.5.

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listen they will give you markers about what the main headings are, and
when they are filling out these sections. Look over your lecture notes and
think about some of the techniques lecturers use. Try to see the shape of
the lecture. Is the lecturer moving outward from the text to the wider
historical context? Or perhaps they are focusing in, beginning with
background information, looking at a particular political problem or
cultural issue, and then exploring how one text contributes to this debate.
Alternatively, are they working through the text section by section? Or
are they offering a spectrum of views on the text? These are all
approaches you can use in structuring your written work. A clear plan
makes it easier to fulfil your intentions.

Look at the contents page of this guide. That is a tidy version of the
plan I am using as I write. Ideally you want something that looks a bit like
that, but shorter. You should also have a good idea of what goes in each
section. I have chosen a plan that moves from general principles that you
should think about before you start, through useful tools that you need as
you go along, to some details that apply specifically to literature and
which will give your work polish. Sometimes you will have information
that could belong in more than one section. For example, you will find
information about choosing secondary sources in Section C, although it
would also have been useful here. Use your judgement about where
things go and what belongs together. Try to give your essay direction,
and keep thinking about the question.

3.2 Introductions and conclusions

Have one of each in every piece of work. Avoid repeating the question in
the introduction, but do offer an outline of the areas you will discuss. If
you have a particularly juicy quote or a fascinating fact, this may be a
good place to show it off. Do not make wild generalisations about the
‘Victorians’, ‘most readers’, ‘all poets’, ‘middle-class people’, ‘critics’ etc.
However if you have found a particularly outrageous generalisation in
something you have read, do feel free to start by quoting this and then
contradict it. Read some academic journal articles and see how other
writers kick off. This is usually the hardest bit of an essay to get right.

Imagine you are answering this question: Explore the connection

between marriage and money in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.
A weak introduction would be something like this:

Marriage and money are important themes in Pride and Prejudice.

This essay explores the connection between marriage and money

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 in Jane Austen’s novel. First I will look at the theme of marriage,
followed by the theme of money. Then I will look at the connection
between the two. From this we will be able to see what Austen is
trying to say about the link between them.

There is nothing really wrong with this, but it does not open up the
question in an interesting way or provide anything to grab the reader’s
attention. A good introduction offers a sense of where the essay will go.
Something like this is better:

The connection between marriage and money lies at the heart of

Pride and Prejudice. From the opening sentence to Elizabeth and
Darcy’s engagement, this novel highlights the desirability of
financial security in marriage. However, this novel also shows the
dangers of marrying purely for gain. This essay will explore the
different models of marriage which Austen presents in Pride and
Prejudice: marrying for money without love, marrying for love
without money, and marrying with both. These models allow
Austen to examine the place of the marriageable woman within the
society of her period.

This demonstrates a knowledge of the text and some intelligent thought

on the question. It also maps out the plan of the essay that is going to
follow. If you can do this in advance then your way ahead will be much
clearer. However, it is always worth going back to look at your
introduction once you have finished the essay. Does it promise
something that is not in the essay? Or could you flag up an interesting
idea in a more stylish way? Do not be afraid to rewrite the introduction if
necessary. Think of this as the shop-window for your work. Show what
you have in store in a way that will encourage someone to come in for a
closer look.

Conclusions are also hard to handle gracefully, but it is better to try

than to ignore the problem. Return to the issues which were raised by
the question and show how what you have said proves your point. Avoid
introducing any new ideas or material here. Do not save up your main
idea as a punch-line. Similarly avoid repeating what you said earlier,
although you can, of course, refer back. As with the introduction, a short,
well-chosen quote can help. Although it looks good if you explore a
range of arguments during the essay itself, a conclusion should always
conclude. Push your thinking towards some sort of resolution. Do not just
sit on the fence. Answer the question one way or the other.

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3.3 Subheadings

These can be useful in longer bits of work, such as honours

dissertations. In essays, however, it is better to create a flow of
connected ideas without stopping and starting. In a dissertation,
subheadings will show your marker where you are going. They also allow
you to see whether one section of your dissertation has outgrown the
others. If this is a problem, you might want to consider revising your plan
to accommodate your material, or split a large section in two. However, a
few subheadings go a long way. Only mark major sections.

3.4 Paragraphs

Ideally the structure of your essay should be obvious from your

paragraphs. Each paragraph should be a step forward in your argument.
Think of each paragraph as a mini essay in which you introduce a new
idea, present some evidence to back it up, and draw a conclusion from it.
Once you have done this, start a new one.

Within a section you can link paragraphs together by connective

words and phrases, such as ‘however’, ‘consequently’, ‘moreover’. But
make sure that these words really justify their presence. There is no use
saying, ‘it follows that,’ if it is not obvious how one idea leads to the
other. Similarly, avoid pompous declarations such as ‘it is the case that’
and ‘it is a useful observation to note that’ etc. My advice is to avoid
starting paragraphs with vague pronouns such as ‘it’ and ‘this’. If you
cannot use a real noun, you might want to stop and ask yourself exactly
what you are talking about. If you want to pick up an idea from the last
paragraph and explore it further, that is fine. However, you need to name
this idea, so that the reader can see what you are doing. Be specific. Use
nouns and verbs.

Markers are suspicious of paragraphs consisting of less than three

sentences or rambling on for more than a page and a half. Read through
your essay once you are finished. If you find any paragraphs that are too
long or too short, consider revising where the breaks fall. Do not use
novels or newspapers as models for paragraphing. Novelists and
journalists are aiming for very different effects. Journalists rarely have
more than one sentence in a paragraph, and often do not write complete
sentences. They are playing a different game altogether. Here again,
journal articles or critical books will offer good examples, so pay attention
to this as you do your research.

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 Indent the start of every paragraph by hitting the tab key to the left
of Q on the keyboard. This makes it very obvious where your paragraph
starts. Do not indent your first paragraph or a new paragraph after a
subheading. Do not indent after a quotation, unless you are starting a
new paragraph. For more advice on layout of quotes see pages 46-49.

4. LAYOUT

You can lose the goodwill of your marker before they even start by
presenting an essay that is hard to read. There are several things that
you can do to make your essay look good. These will not get you extra
marks, but they might stop you losing some. They will put your marker in
a better frame of mind.

Put the question at the top. It might be obvious to you which question
you are answering, but believe me, it is not always clear to the marker.
Having the question on your essay also helps you to keep the question in
mind as you write. But do not spend hours designing an elaborate title
page. Put that time and effort into your written work. In exams there is no
need to rewrite the question, but mark the number clearly both on your
answer and on the front of the paper.

Double-space the text. The reason for this is so that the marker has
space to correct your work in between the lines. It is for your benefit,
even if it does not feel like it.

Leave a wide margin. This leaves room for comments and corrections.
These will be useful. Make sure you read them.

Use a sensible font. Times New Roman or Arial are best as these are
easy to read and familiar to the eye. Use 12-point text. Anything smaller
is hard to read. Anything bigger suggests that you might be trying to
cover up for a short piece of work. Do not put quotations in italics, unless
that is how they appear in the text you are quoting. Only use italics for
titles of books and plays or words in a foreign language.

Give clear references. It is easy when you know how. See pages 50-61.

Give a bibliography or a reference list. Even if you only have one or

two texts to list, please do so. It looks professional and it is a good habit
to form.

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Include a word count. Writing to length is a useful skill which you will
need later on. Learn to tailor your work to the requested word length.
You will not be penalised for an essay that is within 10% of the stated
word count, either over or under. However, you will be penalised for lying
about it. When marking essays for a whole class, it is usually easy for the
marker to tell when something is too long or too short. So, be honest
here or face the consequences.

5. SUBMITTING YOUR WORK

Make sure you know the submission dates and regulations for your
course. You can get this information from your course guide or in the
student guides on My Aberdeen. Work submitted up to a week late will
be penalised by three marks, unless you have a medical certificate. If
you need an extension of more than one week for medical reasons, or
because you have a serious personal problem, you must ask the course
convener (for levels 1 and 2) or the programme convener (for levels 3
and 4). Try to let your tutor know about a problem as quickly as possible.

Your course guide will also have information about marking criteria
and how to interpret the Common Assessment Scale. It is worth
understanding how the marking system works, so have a look at this.
Also look at the cover sheet which you should attach to your essay
before handing it in at the office. This cover sheet gives you a good idea
of what your marker wants to see in your essay.

Return of written work usually takes two to three weeks. Most

courses operate a system of essay moderation. This means that once
your tutor has marked your work they pass it on to another member of
staff who looks at several randomly selected essays and any borderline
cases. This means the system is fair, but can take a bit of time,
especially in the middle of term when we have other things to do. Please
be patient, and try not to pester your tutor for your work. This will only
slow them down.

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Further Reading

Abrams, M. H., A Glossary of Literary Terms (1941; repr. London:

Wadsworth, 1996)

Clancy, John and Brigit Ballard, How to Write Essays: A Practical Guide
for Students (Harlow: Longman, 1998)

Greetham, Bryan, How to Write Better Essays (London: Palgrave, 1999)

Hennesey, Brendan, Writing an Essay (Oxford: How to Books, 2002)

Peck, John and Martin Coyle, Literary Terms and Criticism (Houndmills:
Palgrave, 2002)

— Practical Criticism: How to Write a Critical Appreciation (Houndmills:

Palgrave, 1985)

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 QUICK FIX: PLANNING

1. Read the text carefully, but do not focus so closely on your chosen
question that you miss out on everything else. Take notes as you go
along. It saves time later.

2. Make sure you understand the question. If you are unclear about
anything, look it up or ask your tutor. It is better to look a bit silly at this
stage than after the event.

3. Think about the question, and try to work out why your marker has set
it. How does it connect with issues and ideas explored in lectures and
tutorials? Work out which issues you are going to concentrate on.

4. Make a plan. Remember that your essay is an argument that should

persuade the reader. Try to give it direction and purpose. Focus
everything towards answering the question you have chosen. Work out at
this stage which material you will use in each section.

5. Avoid using the plot of the text as the structure for your essay.
Demonstrate that you can step back and view the text as a series of
connected ideas or strategies. Do not simply follow the events and
comment on them as they unfold.

6. If you are writing a comparative essay on more than one text, make
sure you integrate the texts fully. Do not simply talk about them one after
the other. Create a plan that allows you to bounce ideas between the texts
and build up a bigger picture.

7. Use your introduction to outline where you are going in the essay. Avoid
simply restating the question. Try to be interesting.

8. Use paragraphs to distinguish between separate ideas and to move

your argument forward.

9. Use your conclusion to point out how the evidence you have given
answers the question. Make sure you answer the question. Do not sit on
the fence.

10. Lay out your essay neatly and with enough room for comments and
corrections.

17
 SECTION B: LANGUAGE

6. REGISTER

Writing well involves presenting your material in a tone appropriate to

your audience and to the task in hand. You would use different styles of
language for a business letter, a newspaper report, a text to a friend or a
short story. It is important to develop a suitable tone, or register, for your
written work. A university essay is a formal document and requires a
formal register. Students often struggle to find a balance between formal,
intellectual language and open, accessible English. Many reputable
scholars struggle with this too, which is why some academic books are
so hard to understand. However, even the most complicated ideas can
be articulated clearly. Your marker will be delighted to see complex
thought presented in plain English. They will also notice if you dress up
weak thinking in flowery language. Pay attention to the register of your
writing and remember who will read your work.

Read critics: You need to do this anyway for your own research. As you
read secondary sources look at the way in which critics use language. If
it seems too dense and formal then do not copy their style. However, if
you find a book that is lucid, interesting and readable, try to work out
what makes it so clear.

Avoid being too personal: Your name appears on the front of your
essay, therefore your marker already knows that everything in the essay
is your opinion. Do not keep saying ‘in my opinion’ or ‘it seems to me
that’ etc. Have the courage of your convictions and state what you think.
If you can back up your views with evidence from the text or secondary
sources, there is no need to apologise or hesitate. Some markers dislike
the use of ‘I’ anywhere in the essay. Others are more relaxed about this.
It is probably best to avoid it if possible. Present your work as a piece of
cohesive thought rather than as collection of your own responses. ‘This
essay will focus on’ sounds better than ‘I want to look at’. We are trying
to train you to be objective and analytical, so demonstrate that you are
developing these skills.

Avoid slang: This does not just cover words and phrases. You also
want to steer clear of informal expressions and sentence constructions.
Avoid saying things like: ‘This poem really hits you between the eyes
when you read it. You know what I mean?’ You can express the same
idea by saying: ‘This is a poem of enormous emotional power,’ or, ‘This
poem demands a strong emotional response from the reader.’ As with ‘I’,

18
it is best to avoid using ‘you’ or ‘us’ for the reader of the text. ‘One’
sounds rather formal in everyday speech, but it can be very useful in this
setting.

Avoid being too clever: Some of the worst grammatical errors are
caused by students trying to write long, complex sentences. Always use
the shortest possible sentence for what you want to say. Similarly, do not
use words that you think you understand. If in doubt, look them up or
leave them out.

Tenses: Use present tense for anything that happens in the story, novel,
play or poem. Use past tense for historical events or events in the life of
the writer. This helps to keep the two worlds separate: ‘Henry James was
an American writer who lived and wrote in Europe. In The Portrait of a
Lady he explores the social tensions which surround Isabel Archer as
she moves between these two continents.’

7. PUNCTUATION

Punctuation matters. It does not simply tell the reader when to start and
stop. It organises the text into meaningful units, and shows the
relationships between these units. Getting it wrong can seriously damage
the sense of the text. If you do need convincing, look at this example
from Lynne Truss’s book, Eats, Shoots and Leaves:

Dear Jack,
I want a man who knows what love is all about. You are generous,
kind, thoughtful. People who are not like you admit to being useless and
inferior. You have ruined me for other men. I yearn for you. I have no
feeling whatsoever when we’re apart. I can be forever happy — will you
let me be yours?
Jill

Dear Jack.
I want a man who knows what love is. All about you are generous,
kind, thoughtful people, who are not like you. Admit to being useless and
inferior. You have ruined me. For other men I yearn! For you I have no
feelings whatsoever. When we’re apart I can be forever happy. Will you
let me be?
Yours, Jill 2

2
Lynne Truss, Eats, Shoots and Leaves: The Zero-Tolerance Approach to
Punctuation (London: Profile Books, 2003), p.9.

19
7.1 Apostrophes

This is the most common problem in written English. One can see
apostrophes in the wrong places in shops, theatre programmes, adverts,
newspapers, restaurant menus and more. There is always some public
debate going on about whether we should retain apostrophes in the
language or abolish them because so few people seem capable of using
them properly. But the fact is that they still exist, and we still expect you
to be able to put them in the right places. Before writing this guide, I
asked my colleagues what they thought was the biggest problem in
students’ written work. Wrong use of apostrophes was overwhelmingly at
the top of the list. The reason this annoys markers so much is that the
rules are pretty simple. Here they are:

USE AN APOSTROPHE TO:

Signal possession by adding ’s to a singular noun: Susan’s book,

King’s College, the boy’s father, the woman’s coat, the banana’s
skin.

If the noun or name already ends in s then go ahead and add ’s

as normal: Tess’s book, Dickens’s novels, the bus’s driver.

A plural noun ending in s takes an apostrophe after the s: the boys’

fathers, the buses’ drivers, the horses’ owner.

A plural noun not ending in s takes ’s: the women’s rights, the
children’s school.

Get into the habit of taking a moment to check if the apostrophe

should be before or after the s every time you use one. Do not tuck
the apostrophe into a name that already has an s: Dicken’s novels,
Keat’s poems, or into possessive pronouns (see below).

Signal a missing letter in a contraction such as don’t, won’t, isn’t, it’s.

However, these contractions are informal and should not appear in
academic essays, except when they appear in quotations from
texts. Write these out in full: do not, will not, is not, it is, etc.

20
DO NOT USE AN APOSTROPHE FOR:

Plurals of nouns ending in vowels such as banana’s, piano’s, tomato’s

instead of bananas, pianos, tomatoes. This is known as the
‘greengrocer’s apostrophe’, but crops up everywhere. There is no
excuse for this; it is just plain wrong.

Possessive pronouns such as hers, yours, theirs, its, ours. These

are complete words, like his and mine.

It’s and its are commonly confused, but this really annoys your marker,
so get this one right. It’s should never appear in your written work. If you
mean it is, then write this out in full. If you mean belonging to it, then
there is no apostrophe. Run a search on your essay and correct any it’s
that you find lurking in your text. Also look out for who’s and whose.

7.2 Commas

I used to be a sub-editor on a daily newspaper. I would get a rough and

ready news story from a reporter, and I would cut and correct it. I would
put their commas in the right places. I would send it to the chief sub-
editor who would look over it and put my commas in the right places. He
would send it to the night editor, who would approve it, and put all his
commas in the right places. We all thought we were correct. Different
writers vary their use of commas, which can be confusing when you are
getting to grips with the rules. In the last forty years, English has shifted
quite radically to using as few commas as possible. Someone who went
to university in the 1960s will have learned different rules from accepted
contemporary practice. However, this does not mean that you can put
commas wherever you like. Commas provide the internal structure or
map of each sentence. They mark out which bits of the sentence are
essential to its meaning and which bits are supplementary. They show
where clauses start and stop, and they separate items in lists. Getting
them in the right place keeps the movement of the sentence clear, but
having too many can slow down your reader and make the sentence
seem cluttered and fussy. Here are some rules which you should learn to
observe:

21
USE A COMMA:

To link two sentences with a conjunction (and, but, because, or

etc):
This makes a compound sentence. There are three examples of
this kind of sentence in the passage above. For example, the
second sentence could be split into two:

 I would get a rough and ready news story from a reporter. I

would cut and correct it.

I have chosen to link the two sentences with a comma and the
word and to emphasise that I want the reader to take both sections
as part of the same event. However, a comma cannot link two
sentences by itself. If I insert a comma but miss out the word
and, I create a comma splice (see page 25). The second last
sentence has a similar structure. Here I have used but to
emphasise the contrast. Technically it is possible to link together
several sentences with commas to make a very long, complex
sentence. D. H. Lawrence and Henry James do this all the time in
their fiction, but you should avoid it. Limit yourself to one
conjunction per sentence where possible. It is always better to
write short, clear sentences in essays.

After connective adverbs: These words are very useful at the

beginning of sentences in essays as they show how your argument
is moving from sentence to sentence. However, yet, still,
nevertheless, therefore, thus, moreover, for example, etc, can
be used to suggest a connection or contrast between two
sentences without formally joining them. A comma is required after
one of these when it appears at the beginning of a sentence.

 However, you will always make occasional mistakes.

However is particularly problematic. If you leave out this comma, it

sounds like the whole sentence is a subordinate clause which
should lead to some other statement. If however is operating as
part of a subordinate clause, the comma goes after the clause:

 However much you try, you will always make occasional

mistakes.

This is easy to get wrong, so look out for this one.

22
 Though and although cannot be used as connective adverbs at
the start of sentences:

X Although, many people try to do so.

They can, however, be used at the start of a subordinate clause:

 Although Elizabeth finds Darcy overbearing, she is obviously

the only woman in the novel who is his intellectual equal.

To separate items in a list: This works for nouns and adjectives:

 Oscar Wilde wrote novels, plays, poetry, journalism, criticism

and children’s stories. However, he is most famous for his
colourful, controversial private life.

If you have three or more items, you should use and between the
last two. Avoid listing verbs and adverbs. One at a time is quite
enough.

To signal parenthesis: Commas can be used like brackets to insert an

extra piece of information, interesting or otherwise, into a sentence.
Reread that last sentence without the words between the two
commas. It still makes sense. The phrase between the commas is
not a complete sentence. In this case it is a modifying phrase,
which adds some extra information or comment about the
preceding noun. The first comma signals a short diversion from the
sentence. The second comma shows that this is finished, and the
sentence picks up where it left off. You could insert a different kind
of phrase or clause here, such as ‘or even a witty aside’ or ‘if you
have any extra information to insert’. Parentheses have great
comic potential, but try to resist the temptation to use them in
essays for hilarious remarks that probably will not seem so funny to
your marker. Also avoid using them to include lists of things that
you would like to mention but cannot be bothered to include
properly in a working sentence:

X Hamlet has many flaws, indecisiveness, arrogance, suspicion

of others etc, which undermine his heroic potential.

Here it would be better to say

23
  Hamlet has many flaws which undermine his heroic potential.
He is indecisive, arrogant and suspicious of others.

It sounds less muddled. Also, avoid long, rambling diversions in

sentences, or diversions within a diversion. One short phrase is
fine, but if your parenthesis is any longer than ten words, you
should consider putting this information in a sentence of its own. If
you do use commas to form a parenthesis, make sure you close it.
You would not use just one bracket. In fact, avoid brackets and
dashes wherever possible. Good use of commas is much more
elegant.

To mark out clauses: If you are hazy about what a clause is, you need
to read something that will explain the basics of grammar slowly
and carefully. See the list at the end of Section B for some further
reading. Traditional grammar is very careful to note every shift in
the syntax of a sentence by inserting a comma. (See Jane
Austen’s sentence on page 10.) Modern writing is more relaxed
about this. Look at sentences four and five in the opening
paragraph about commas on page 21. These sentences are
grammatically identical, but I have only put commas in one of them
so that you can see the two styles in action. Aptly enough, the chief
sub-editor liked to take commas out whenever possible, while the
night editor liked to put them back in. In that particular case it does
not make much difference. The syntax works either way. Some
clauses do not need to be separated by commas, especially when
a linking word such as that, whenever, since etc is used.
However, commas can make a dramatic difference to the meaning
of a sentence. Leaving them out can make a sentence ambiguous.
Use commas to make your meaning apparent, not just to provide
pauses where you think the reader needs a rest. The easiest way
to get this right is to be absolutely clear in your own head about
what you want to say, and to say it as simply as possible. You will
find a quick explanation of clauses on page 30, which should help.

To introduce speech: A comma is used to introduce speech or a

quotation when it forms part of the preceding or following
sentence:

 Hamlet says, ‘I know a hawk from a handsaw.’3

3
William Shakespeare, Hamlet, in The Complete Works of Shakespeare, 2 vols
(New York: Nelson Doubleday, 1968), vol II, Act II, Sc. 2, p.611.

24
 or
 ‘I know a hawk from a handsaw,’ says Hamlet.

You can also use a colon to introduce a quotation or speech:

 Hamlet says: ‘I know a hawk from a handsaw.’

Always use a colon when the quotation follows a complete

sentence:

 Hamlet insists that he is sane: ‘I know a hawk from a

handsaw.’

DO NOT USE COMMAS:

To join sentences without a conjunction: This creates a comma

splice, which comes a close second to dodgy apostrophes on the
marker’s hate-list. A comma splice looks like this:

X Some markers are sent into a rage by comma splices, they

will give themselves a hernia with fury, and will cover your
essay in red pen.

It should read:

 Some markers are sent into a rage by comma splices. They

will give themselves a hernia with fury, and will cover your
essay in red pen.
or
 Some markers are sent into a rage by comma splices; they
will give themselves a hernia with fury, and will cover your
essay in red pen.

Oddly enough, this quirk was tolerated more in the nineteenth

century. So, you will sometimes see comma splices used by very
stylish and correct writers, such as Robert Louis Stevenson or
Ralph Waldo Emerson, which would now get red pen all over them.
This just proves that the language is alive and constantly changing,
but it is not worth arguing this point with your tutor. Learn the
current rules and follow them. My experience as a marker suggests
that the comma splice is a common mistake of bright students who
read quickly and think coherently. Sometimes certain ideas seem
so connected that one instinctively wants to put them in the same

25
 sentence. However, linking these is no longer the job of the
comma. If you really want to run together two sentences that seem
to connect, consider a semi-colon (see below). It is an under-used
punctuation resource. Alternatively include a conjunction, and, but,
so, or, for etc. Connective adverbs such as however, yet, still,
nevertheless, therefore, thus, moreover etc are not strong
enough to join two sentences. If you want to use one of these stop
the sentence and start again, or use a semi-colon. If you are a fast
reader, keep a special lookout for comma splices as you proofread.

7.3 Semi-colons

Few people know how to use a semi-colon well, which is a pity, as this is
an elegant element of style. It has two main functions in prose:

To connect two sentences: This is a good antidote to the comma

splice. It works especially well for short sentences where the sense
follows on directly into the second sentence, and where the two
halves are of equal importance and length:

 I opened the book; I began to read.

It is also possible to use a semi-colon with a connective adverb:

 I opened the book; however, I did not begin to read.

This is more cumbersome and should be used sparingly. The

golden rule of using semi-colons to join clauses is that each half of
the completed sentence should also operate as a grammatical
sentence in its own right. In other words, only use a semi-colon
where you could put a full stop. Therefore, you should avoid putting
a semi-colon next to conjunctions, such as and, but, so etc, or
relatives, such as that, which, when etc. You do not need these.
The semi-colon does the job of linking well enough by itself.

To separate items on a list: This is especially useful when the list is

long and the individual items on the list include commas:

 There are many ghosts and spirits in Victorian fiction: the

Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future in A Christmas
Carol by Charles Dickens; the dead servants, Quint and
Jessel, in The Turn of the Screw by Henry James; and the

26
 unseen presence of Jane’s mother in Jane Eyre by Charlotte
Bronte.

This way the reader can easily tell where the important divisions
between the items occur. If this list only contained commas, it
would be very confusing. When using semi-colons in a list, it is
often a good idea to introduce the list with a colon to show where
the list begins.

7.4 Colons

Like semi-colons, these are rarely used but are not as confusing as
many people think. The function of a colon is to introduce information of
some kind:

To introduce a list: A colon announces that something important is

about to follow. This makes it ideal for kicking off a long list, as
above. The list can also be a sequence of short items separated by
commas:

 A cake requires four ingredients: flour, sugar, butter and

eggs.

To introduce a quotation or speech: This is very useful in essays, and

works well before a large, indented quotation. Always use a colon
to introduce a quotation which follows a complete sentence.

To introduce an explanation or statement: In this case the colon is

used to create some sort of anticipation. It is often used when
reporting speech or when summarizing or expanding the first half
of the sentence:

 Austen’s message is clear: money is an essential element in

a happy marriage.
or
 Elizabeth makes her feelings obvious: she despises Mr
Collins.

Unlike the semi-colon, the colon does not always require two
equally balanced clauses. In fact, it works most powerfully when it
is used to introduce a single word or a short, punchy phrase:

27
  However, Austen’s heroines desire something more than
money: love.
or
 Elizabeth feels only one emotion for Mr Collins: contempt.

This construction also works in reverse:

 Contempt: this is the only emotion Elizabeth feels for Mr

Collins.

This is very striking and, as with all grammatical flourishes, should

be used occasionally and with caution. Try this no more than once
a term.

7.5 Dashes

Unlike semi-colons and colons, dashes are over-used. They are often
used by writers who are unsure which punctuation mark to choose.
Dashes should NOT be used instead of brackets, parenthetical commas,
semi-colons, full stops, or colons before lists and quotations. Avoid all of
the following constructions:

X Elizabeth — an independent young woman — is in no hurry to

marry.
X Elizabeth makes her feelings obvious — she despises Mr Collins.
X Elizabeth feels only one emotion for Mr Collins — contempt.

All of these can be rewritten using more appropriate punctuation.

However, dashes do have their place, whatever some may say. When
you use one make sure you type a long dash (—) not a short hyphen (-).
Press Ctrl, Alt and the hyphen key at the top right of your keyboard.
Dashes are useful where the sense of the sentence is interrupted in
some way, or where a long qualification or description has led away from
the main point of the sentence. The dash provides a breathing space in
which the sentence can reorganise itself:

 Elizabeth Bennett is young, attractive, intelligent, vivacious,

independent to the point of stubbornness — the classic Austen
heroine.

The final phrase does not fit easily into the syntax of the sentence, but it
is obviously referring to the subject of the sentence, Elizabeth Bennett. If
you were to put a comma after ‘stubbornness’, the final phrase would get

28
lost in the list of adjectives. You could create a new sentence: ‘She is the
classic Austen heroine.’ However, this lacks the immediacy and
movement of this version. A dash seems justified in this case. Here is
another one:

 Hamlet’s indecisiveness, his arrogance, his suspicion of others, his

passionate, brooding, introspective nature — these all contribute to
his downfall.

In both these sentences you could quite correctly substitute a colon.

However, the effect of a colon is to lead the reader forward into the
following section. A dash is more like a bucket of cold water flung in the
reader’s face, jolting them back to the starting point of the sentence.
Nobody wants this experience too often, so, once more, use with
extreme caution. If you can replace a dash with another punctuation
mark, you probably should.

7.6 Quotation marks

In British usage, speech and quotations are signalled by single quote

marks:

 Dickens begins A Christmas Carol with a ghostly reference: ‘Marley

was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that.’

Quotations and speech within quotations are signalled by double quote

marks:

 ‘“Bah!” said Scrooge, “Humbug!”’

You will see this done the other way around, with double quote marks on
the outside and single quotes within. This will probably be in books or
journals published in the US, where the system is reversed. Please use
the British system. For more on quotations, see Section C.

7.7 Exclamation marks

Do not use these, unless they appear in quotations (see above). An

academic essay does not need to exclaim or insist. It reasons and
persuades.

29
8 GRAMMAR

Language needs grammar. It is essential if you want to construct any

kind of statement beyond simply naming objects. If you want to express
interesting ideas then a sound grasp of grammar is essential. Your
understanding of grammar may be more developed than you realise. If
you have studied a foreign language, you may have a very sophisticated
knowledge of how it works. Many students use grammar well without
knowing all the terms for the techniques they are using. This is fine when
it works, but it can help to stop and think about what you are doing.
Markers tend to use technical, grammatical terms when pointing out
problems in your work, which is not much use to you if you do not know
what they are talking about. This section will point out a few common
problems, and offer definitions of some terms that may crop up in your
markers’ comments. If you have serious problems with grammar, this
booklet will not solve them. If your markers consistently complain about
your syntax, sentence structure, tenses or pronouns, you probably need
to get some help from one of the sources listed on page 3.

8.1 Clauses

Clauses are the internal sections of a sentence, which fit together to

build up meaning. Every clause has a noun and a verb, sometimes
called a subject and a predicate. However, not all clauses are of equal
weight and value. The clauses of a sentence are like the internal walls of
a house. Some can be moved around or altered without doing too much
damage. One is always essential and cannot be removed without the
whole thing falling in. Clauses which are essential are main clauses. A
compound sentence (see page 22) will have two main clauses. A main
clause requires a noun and a verb:

I know.

However, it can also be more elaborate:

I know some useful things about grammar.

A main clause is the bit of a sentence which can make a sentence all by
itself. ‘Know’ is the principal verb of this sentence, which means it is the
verb in the main clause. ‘I’ is the subject of the sentence, which means it
is the noun doing the verb, also called the predicate. ‘Some useful
things about grammar’ forms the object of the sentence. This is the noun
phrase which represents the thing that ‘I know’. Subjects, objects and

30
predicates can all be made up of single words or phrases to make up the
main clause.

Subordinate clauses: Onto this main clause one can attach other
clauses, which support and describe the main clause. These are called
subordinate clauses. All the subordinate clauses in the following
examples are underlined. Subordinate clauses can often be moved
around without changing the meaning of a sentence:

I know some useful things about grammar, which is lucky for you.
or
It is lucky for you that I know some useful things about grammar.

A subordinate clause is a section of a sentence which contains a subject

and a predicate (ie. a noun and a verb), but which is doing the job of an
adverb or an adjective. It is not part of the main action of the sentence. It
is describing a thing or an action in the main clause or in another
subordinate clause. A sentence can have more than one subordinate
clause. They can follow and/or precede the main clause.

Because I have studied English, I know some useful things about

grammar, which is lucky for you, as you can draw on these to
improve your writing.

By now, however, this sentence is getting a bit long and complex for my
liking. Once you have more than three clauses in a sentence, it is very
easy to get muddled up about which is the important one. I advise
against sentences any more complex than this. They are hard to write
well and hard work to read. The real danger is when the main clause
gets missed out, and you end up with something like this:

X Because I have studied English, which is lucky for you, as you can
draw on these to improve your writing.

This is not a sentence. It has no main verb, only a succession of

subordinate clauses. A subordinate clause is often flagged up by a word
such as while, which, if, that, whenever, although, as, despite, etc.
This kind of clause describes the subject, the object or the predicate of
the main clause. A phrase containing a participle (usually a verb ending
in –ing) behaves similarly. These cannot form sentences in their own
right, even though you may see it done in The Sunday Times. In your
written work, therefore, you should avoid things like this:

31
X Although this is not the case.
X However much you try.
X Rarely appearing to do so.
X Being of sound mind and judgement.

All of these are sentence fragments. They do have nouns and verbs,
but they lack a principal verb and are not valid as stand-alone sentences
in formal written English. Charles Dickens, who was once a journalist,
uses these often in his fiction for dramatic effect. However, they have no
place in academic essays. The Microsoft grammar check will not always
pick up sentence fragments, so you need to correct these carefully
yourself.

Dangling elements: You also need to make sure that the different bits
of the sentence match up in a way that makes sense. A subordinate
clause or participle phrase can cause complications when it is not quite
clear to which bit of the main clause it refers. For example:

While she was writing The Voyage Out, Virginia Woolf’s sister
Vanessa Bell painted her portrait.

The first clause of this sentence is a dangling clause, because the

‘while’ clause dangles pointlessly and ambiguously from the main clause
which it should modify and clarify. This sentence suggests that Virginia’s
Woolf’s sister wrote The Voyage Out, which is not the case. It also fails
to make clear whose portrait was painted. In this sort of sentence, try to
keep the subject of the main clause as the subject of the subordinate
clause, so that the two halves of the sentence are talking about the same
thing or person. This may require some rewording.

While Virginia Woolf was writing The Voyage Out, she sat for a
portrait painted by her sister Vanessa Bell.

This is clearer. However, it is also possible to solve this kind of problem

by writing shorter sentences:

Vanessa Bell painted a portrait of her sister, Virginia Woolf. During

this period, Woolf was writing The Voyage Out.

Look out for other elements in sentences that ‘dangle’. Make it clear what
each bit of the sentence describes. Remember that pronouns usually
refer to the most recent available noun. (See section on pronouns page

32
37.) Make sure that what you have written makes sense to your reader,
not just to you.

Relative clauses: A relative clause is a subordinate clause which refers

to a preceding noun or pronoun. It usually starts with who, which or
that. In the following sentence the relative clause has been underlined:

The play which we studied last year is out of print.

Relative clauses can be divided into two kinds: defining and non-
defining.

A defining relative clause is essential to the meaning of the sentence

because it gives important information about the preceding word. This
identifies it in some way, marking it out from all other possible
occurrences of the word. The example above is a defining relative
clause. It makes clear that the sentence is discussing one particular play
studied last year, in contrast to any other plays studied this year or two
years ago.

A non-defining relative clause offers information that describes but

does not specify; it is doing the same job as a modifying clause in a
parenthesis (see page 17). Like this, it must be enclosed in commas to
keep it out of the way of the main action of the sentence:

 Shakespeare, who was born in 1564, wrote poetry as well as plays.

When the clause defines, there are no commas. When it does not, it is
surrounded by commas, or by a comma and a full stop, if it ends the
sentence. Remember to add the second comma after a non-defining
relative clause. Avoid things like this:

X Shakespeare, who was born in 1564 wrote poetry as well as plays.

It is important to decide whether a relative clause is defining or non-

defining, since the commas alone can change the meaning completely.
Compare the two pairs below:

He answered all the questions which were on Shakespeare.

He answered all the questions, which were on Shakespeare.

33
Were all the available questions on Shakespeare or not? My personal
favourite in this category is:

All the sailors who were in the lifeboat were saved.

All the sailors, who were in the lifeboat, were saved.

The first sentence implies that some sailors did not make it into the
lifeboat and came to a sorry end. The other one says that all the sailors
were in the lifeboat and survived. Who says punctuation is not a matter
of life and death?

That and which: If you use your Microsoft grammar check as you write,
you will find that it constantly makes a fuss about whether you use ‘that
or ‘which’ at the beginning of relative clauses. The people at Microsoft,
for reasons of their own, will not let you start a defining relative clause
with ‘which’. If you type a comma followed by ‘which’, a green line
appears under the text. Microsoft insists on:

The play that we studied last year is out of print.

or
He answered all the questions that were on Shakespeare.

You can do it this way for a quiet life, but the rule above about commas
is the important one. Microsoft is not the ultimate authority on grammar,
and I do not see why it should be allowed to boss everyone around. I
reserve the right to use both ‘that’ and ‘which’ in defining clauses as
appropriate. You should too.

8.2 Agreement

Subject and verb agreement: A singular subject should have a singular

verb. A plural subject should have a plural verb. This sounds simple, but
can be confusing when the subject of the sentence is a short phrase
rather than one word:

X The number of passes have risen to fifty.

The verb should be has:

 The number of passes has risen to fifty.

34
The main subject of this sentence is ‘the number’. The phrase ‘of passes’
is only a modifier of the subject. ‘Number’ is singular and requires a
singular verb. However, a phrase containing ‘a number of’ would take a
plural verb, just like a phrase containing a lot of before a plural noun:

 A number of passes are just above the borderline.

 A lot of passes are just above the borderline.

This is because a number of and a lot of behave like modifiers, such as

‘many’. Be especially careful of this issue if you have a list in a sentence,
or some sort of qualifying or relative clause:

X Hamlet’s failure to take control of the situation, act decisively, and

regain his rightful position as ruler, are disastrous.

Hamlet’s ‘failure’ is the subject of the sentence. So this should read:

 Hamlet’s failure to take control of the situation, act decisively, and

regain his rightful position as ruler, is disastrous.

Collective nouns: Some writers relax the rule about singular subject,
singular verb for collective nouns. These nouns denote groups and
therefore imply their members, such as army, audience, committee,
family and jury. It is often acceptable to say:

My family are delightful.

But if you start this sort of thing, it can be hard to know where to stop.
What about the government, the university, the school, the academic
community, the fire brigade, the company etc? For the sake of
consistency and accuracy, it is better to stick to the singular rule and to
write.

 My family is delightful.

If you want to make it clear that you are talking about the multiple
members of the group then do so. Use a phrase such as

 All the members of my family are delightful.

Indefinite pronouns. The rules about collective nouns become harder if

you include an indefinite pronoun in your sentence such as everybody,

35
everyone, somebody, someone, anybody, anyone, nobody, no one,
none. These words all take a singular verb.

 Everybody in my family is delightful.

Watch out when the indefinite pronoun is used after a plural.

X None of my relatives are delightful.

 None of my relatives is delightful.

This seems counter-intuitive until you remember that ‘none’ is just a short
version of ‘not one.’ All the pronouns listed above follow this rule.
However, they are sometimes linked to the plurals they, their and
them(selves):

Everybody is entitled to their opinion.

or
If someone does not like poetry, I would not make them read it.

This is done to avoid a gendered pronoun. In earlier centuries his or him

was often used in this context as an indefinite pronoun. However, as
many people pointed out, this excluded half the population from this sort
of sentence. One can say ‘his or her’ and ‘him or her’, but it sounds a bit
clumsy, and raises the problem of who should go first: girls or boys?
Many other languages have a non-gendered pronoun, a human version
of it, for this sort of situation, but English does not. Some older writers
object to their, theirs and them in this context, but the language is
definitely moving towards this as the solution to the problem. On the
whole, I think this is better than trying to turn the clock back to a sexist
way of seeing the world.

8.3 Tenses

Make sure that you only write in one tense at a time. It is easy to get this
mixed up if you are using a conditional case or reporting speech. As with
everything else look at what you are writing carefully. Make sure you are
clear what you want to say and that it cannot be read in a different way.
Write about real-life authors in past tense (unless they are still alive) and
fictional characters in present tense. (See page 19.)

36
8.4 Pronouns

A pronoun always refers to the most recent plausible noun. This is called
the law of antecedents. It works like this:

The cat dropped the mouse. It ran away.

This says that the mouse ran away, not the cat. However a gendered
pronoun will match up with the most recent gendered noun, or proper
name.

The girl dropped the mouse. She ran away.

In this case it is the girl who runs away. Technically, of course, it might
be a female mouse. However, we are not told the mouse’s gender, so
the girl is the most likely candidate for ‘she’.

Pronouns can get out of hand when there are too many of them in
a sentence, especially if this sentence contains an indefinite pronoun or
two, such as ‘it’ and ‘this’. For example, what does this mean?

It is useful to note that Hamlet’s indecision about killing his uncle

takes more time than it should, but this doesn’t mean that it is
morally wrong, and this might be the case because he gets to think
about it first.

Is it Hamlet’s indecision or the killing of his uncle that may or may not be
wrong? What might be the case? Who gets to think about it first: Hamlet
or his uncle? A student who writes a sentence like this may have an idea
in their own head what they mean, but they have not exactly made their
point clear. On the whole, you should avoid starting sentences with ‘it’
and ‘this’ whenever possible, and be aware that pronouns later in a
sentence may be misread if not clearly attached to an earlier noun.
There is no law against using a noun or name twice in a sentence if it
helps clarify the point. Always strike out pointless phrases such as ‘it is
useful to note that’. Write shorter sentences.

37
9. SPELLING

There is no short cut to good spelling. You just have to learn what each
word in the language looks like. However, there is one simple thing you
can do which will help: buy a dictionary. A good dictionary will be the
most useful book you buy during your time at university, so do not
grudge the money for it. However, there is no point spending a week’s
rent on a leather-bound, two-volume Shorter Oxford. Buy a small,
compact dictionary, ideally less than 20cm tall, that is light enough and
sturdy enough to travel in your rucksack. A dictionary on the bookshelf is
no use if you are working in the library or the computing centre. Get into
the habit of taking your dictionary (and this booklet) with you when you
are writing, and look up words you are unsure about. This will not just
help with your spelling. Make sure that you also read and understand the
definition of the words you use. It is easy to get similar words confused.
Using a dictionary rather than the spell check on your PC can help you
avoid some embarrassing errors.

Microsoft spell check is a useful function, and can help you spot
typing errors that your eye might otherwise miss. However, it is not
foolproof. It will not notice the difference between their and there, or it
and is, or allusive and elusive. It will clear anything that it finds in its
own dictionary, without checking that this word belongs in your sentence.
If you rely on it too heavily, you can end up with sentences like this:

During this scene, the ghost of Hamlet’s father can be seen

hoovering in the background.

In Paradise Lost, Satan rallies the fallen angles.

Do not automatically accept any corrections that the spell check

suggests. Be especially careful with names. A fourth-year student
recently submitted an essay where the names of the characters Hagar
and Ishmael had been changed throughout to ‘Haggard’ and ‘Fishmeal’.
How we laughed… Always read through your essay carefully after you
have printed it out. You will notice mistakes that you did not pick up on
screen. If there are only a few of these, your marker will not mind if you
correct these by hand.

It is better to show that you have read through your work than to
present a pristine text full of errors. If you find a lot of mistakes, go back
and print out the essay again. Remember that the ability to produce a
clean, polished text is an important skill in its own right. It is worth

38
spending time and effort on this. Not only will good spelling earn you
extra marks for each essay during your time as a student; this is a skill
that will also be useful in the workplace in years to come.

9.1 Common errors

There may be no short cut to good spelling, but there are some common
pit-falls which you can avoid. Here are some areas which need special
care:

words ending —ant/ent eg: dependent, dependant

—ance/ence eg: observance, correspondence
—ite/ate eg: infinite, obstinate
—ible/able eg: fallible, reasonable
—ibility/ability eg: fallibility, disability
—arate/erate eg: separate, desperate
—ege/edge eg: privilege, acknowledge
—cede/ceed eg: precede, proceed
—ice/ise eg: noun practice, verb practise
words beginning —de/di eg: despair, divide
—im/in eg: impossible, inconceivable
words including —ie/ei The old rule is a good one: I before E
except after C, when the sound is E.
—our this often becomes or before a suffix
eg: vigour/vigorous
words which sound alike eg: principle/principal, affect/effect

Trust your dictionary, not your ears.

9.2 Capitals

Proper nouns (names) such as England, France, Scandinavia, the

Thames, Lake Michigan, Mont Blanc, etc, have an initial capital letter. In
English, adjectives and nouns denoting nationality and language do as
well: English, Old English, Middle English, French, Latin, Italian.
Historical periods are treated in the same way: the Middle Ages, the
Renaissance.
Words denoting religions, movements or ‘schools’ and peoples, together
with the adjectives referring to these, and words denoting people
belonging to them, have an initial capital: Christianity, Christian;
Dadaism, Dadaist, Dadaistic; Fabianism, Fabianist, Fabian; Islam,
Islamic; Jew, Jewish. The Bible, the Old Testament, the New Testament,

39
and the Koran all take capitals, as do all book titles. However, the
adjective ‘biblical’ does not.
A common noun is often capitalised when it forms part of a name or a
title. Thus the English Department gets capitals, but the phrase ‘in this
department’ does not. Claudius in Hamlet, is ‘the King’, just as one would
write ‘the Queen’ when referring to Elizabeth II or some other specific
queen. But king or queen used in a general way, does not have a capital
letter. For example, ‘The king of a country should not hold too much
power’. God gets a capital when one is naming the God of Christian,
Islamic or Jewish faiths. Words used as names for God are often
capitalised too, such as the Almighty, the Creator etc, although the
practice of capitalising pronouns referring to God (Him, His, Thy will be
done, etc.) is dying out. The Gods of Ancient Greece and Rome also get
a capital, although ‘gods’ from other cultures do not.

9.3 US v UK Spelling

Please use UK spelling. However, some of the texts which you read will
be printed with US spellings, so it is useful to know the differences.

British ll/ American l: A single vowel at the end of a word is often

doubled before a suffix in UK English, but not in US English:
revelling/reveling.

British re/ American er: centre/center, metre/meter, theatre/theater

British ogue/ American og: catalogue/catalog, demagogue/demagog

British our/ American or: colour/color, humour/humor, vigour/vigor

British se/ American ze: criticise/criticize, analyse/analyze

It is acceptable to reproduce US spellings, if you are quoting from a US

text, such as Robert Frost’s poem ‘The Road Not Taken’:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I —

I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference. 4

4
Robert Frost, The Poetry of Robert Frost, ed. by Edward Connery Lathem (London:
Cape, 1971; repr. 2001), p.105.

40
Further Reading

Burchfield, R. W., ed., Fowler’s Modern English Usage, 3rd edn (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1998)

Gee, Robyn, and Carol Watson, Usborne Guide to Better English:

Grammar, Spelling and Punctuation (London: Usborne, 2004)

Partridge, Eric, Usage and Abusage: A Guide to Good English

(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999)

Peck, John and Martin Coyle. The Student’s Guide to Writing: Grammar,
Spelling and Punctuation (Houndmills: Palgrave, 1999)

Ritter, R. M. ed., The Oxford Dictionary for Writers and Editors, 2nd edn
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000)

Strunk, William and E. B. White, The Elements of Style (London:

Longman, 1999)

Truss, Lynne, Eats, Shoots and Leaves: The Zero-Tolerance Approach

to Punctuation (London: Profile Books, 2003)

41
 QUICK FIX: LANGUAGE

1. Write in clear, simple, formal English.

2. Get apostrophes in the right places. It’s should never appear in your
essay. If you mean it is, write it out in full. If you mean its = belonging to
it, there is no apostrophe.

3. Avoid comma splices; use a semi-colon or start a new sentence.

4. Think about clauses. Do not have too many in one sentence. It is

always better to write short, clear sentences whenever possible. Do not
present subordinate clauses as complete sentences. These are sentence
fragments.

5. Make sure that single nouns have single verbs and that plural nouns
have plural verbs.

6. Write about authors in past tense (unless they are still alive). Write
about fictional characters and events in present tense.

7. Use pronouns with care. Make sure that the pronoun refers to the most
recent available noun. Avoid vague pronouns such as ‘this’ and ‘it’,
especially at the start of sentences.

8. Do not rely on Microsoft to sort out your grammar and spelling.

9. Always read through your work carefully once you have finished.
Correct any mistakes that you find, by hand if necessary.

10. Buy a dictionary and use it.

42
 SECTION C: SOURCES

10. CHOOSING SOURCES

Choosing and using sources is an integral part of studying. Finding

useful texts can seem rather daunting, especially if most of the texts
recommended in the course guide have been checked out of the library.
However, there is no need to panic and log on to Google. There are
thousands of books in the Queen Mother Library. Dozens of these will be
relevant to your essay topic, and many are available to read in electronic
form. Your tutor will not be impressed if you give up searching, and write
a superficial essay built up of information from lecture notes and things
downloaded from the Internet. However, if you are prepared to look a
little bit harder on the library catalogue, you will find some wonderful
sources, which will inform your work and give you original ideas.

Critical books: Obviously, it is helpful if you can get your hands on a

critical book about an author on whom you are writing. However, this is
not the only kind of useful book. There are also many texts in the library
which focus on literary forms and literary periods. If you are writing about
Keats, for example, it might be interesting to start looking for books about
the Romantic Movement or about the history of poetry. Books about
poetic form and structure would give you an insight into how his work
compares to that of other poets. Keats might well get a mention in this
sort of text. You can use the index to see if there is a short section about
him. Ten pages about Keats, fitting him into a wider context, might
actually be more use to you than a long biography which you do not have
the time or energy to read. Finally, critical theory books can provide you
with radical and incisive ways of approaching a text. Begin to think about
how you read, and explore some theories which invite you to try out
different kinds of reading. Your work will be sharper and more rigorous.

Other disciplines: There is no law that says you have to stay in the
literature section. Think creatively about the essay question you have
been set. If it has a historical angle, you might want to look at something
which will give you some background knowledge of the period. Books on
cultural history and sociology can be especially interesting, as they
explore many of the same issues that literature does. If you are working
on a writer who has an interest in philosophy, art or religion, it can be
useful to research the ideas that informed their work. A lot of critical
books will tell you that Thomas Hardy was interested in the philosophy of
Schopenhauer, but very few students bother to go and find out about

43
him. There is no reason why you should not. This may teach you more
about Hardy than ten critical works.

Contemporary Periodicals: Old magazines and newspapers offer a

mine of information about the culture and history of a literary period. You
can also find contemporary reviews of books, plays and poems here.
Many periodicals are available as online databases. Ask in the library for
help with how to search these.

Academic Journals: It is easy to forget about these, but short articles

are often more use than books. They are more compact, quicker to read
and sometimes more interesting. There are several ways of searching for
articles on-line. I recommend LION database, which you can find on the
library webpages by searching for electronic databases. This lists every
work of criticism on literature in English anywhere in the world. It also
includes other smaller databases such as JSTOR and Project Muse. You
can do a keyword search, and it will tell you every book and article on the
subject. Some of these sources are accessible online. Others are
available in paper in the library.

Internet sources: There are many interesting and scholarly pieces of

work on the Internet. There is also a lot of superficial and inaccurate
information. Be very careful about what you use from the Internet. Sites
which are sponsored by universities or academic publishers are likely to
give you very good information. You can often get journal articles on the
Internet which are not available in the library. Databases of periodicals
can put you in touch instantly with information it might otherwise take
hours to find. Literary societies also often have good biographical
information about authors and useful lists of recommended reading.
However, be wary of study-notes sites, which are aimed at school
students and will not bring your work up to the level we would like to see.
Also, discussion boards and essays which are not published through a
recognisable academic site often contain information which is simply not
correct. There is nothing to stop you posting your work on the Internet,
so what you find on Google could just be the work of an enthusiastic
undergraduate with some IT skills. Your marker will get twitchy if more
than half of your bibliography is made up of Internet sites. Make sure you
use a mix of sources as you do your research.

44
11. USING SOURCES

Effective use of secondary sources is crucial. It is almost impossible to

write a really good essay without secondary sources. Even for a critical
analysis, it is a good idea to pick up some generalisations about the
author’s style and that of his contemporaries from critics, and then
compare what they say with the text. Learning from other thinkers and
writers is what being at university is all about. You will also find that
reading other people sharpens up your own ideas. However, you need to
know how to incorporate other writers’ work into your own. Good use of
secondary material shows that you have done your research, and that
you are also confident about your own opinions. It is an essential
element in a first-class essay. Using sources well is much more than
avoiding plagiarism. It is about showing off your knowledge, and making
your sources work to back up your ideas.

11.1 Argue with the critics

Just because someone has spent a lifetime researching a subject and is

an internationally recognised authority on a particular text or author does
not necessarily mean they are right. Feel free to challenge anything and
everything that you read. In fact, when you read secondary sources, you
should probably start with the assumption that you are going to disagree
but you are prepared to be persuaded if they make a good enough case.
This is called critical thinking. Students often discard any secondary
material that they do not agree with. This is like taking the springs out of
a trampoline and then wondering why it does not bounce. Critical
material that you can prove is missing the point is a gift. Roll your
sleeves up and get to work on it. Just make sure you can back up your
position with material from the text or from other critics. Sometimes pure
logic will do the trick too. This is the sort of thing that makes an essay
sparkle. So, be assertive with critics. They are only human after all.

11.2 Acknowledge the critic in your text

It is not enough to drop in a footnote at the end of a sentence, or name a

book in the bibliography. You must acknowledge your sources more
actively than this. Make sure you say who said what and whether you
agree. For example, ‘In her study of the subject, Hazel Hutchison argues
a, which is a useful approach to the text because of b. However, she
overlooks the issue of c, which is a vital element in the plot.’ There are
good reasons for naming the critic like this:

45
It sounds good. Academics all enjoy a bit of name-dropping, and like to
see that you have considered an idea put forward by an important critic
or literary figure. Essays are all about showing what you have read and
learned. Knowing about the key players in a debate is part of this.

It helps your marker: Remember that it is your job to make your essay
accessible to the reader. Your marker may not have read all the books
you refer to, so some help in sorting out who said what is often
appreciated. For example, do you have any idea how many books there
are in the library on Shakespeare? Alternatively, your marker may have
read all your secondary sources, in which case they will expect you to
give credit to the critic where it is due.

It makes for clarity: One of the hardest skills in writing about literature is
making it crystal clear which ideas come from outside sources, which are
based on common knowledge (or hearsay) about period, genre etc, and
which are your own thoughts on the subject. You want to sell the last
category, but your marker will not know what your thoughts are, unless
you make it clear where other people’s ideas stop and yours start. Do not
assume you can fudge this to your advantage. Academics tend to be
cynical by nature, and will assume that you have absorbed ideas from
somewhere else unless you mark this out neatly.

It helps with structure: Naming the critic makes it easier to refer back
to this idea later in the essay. Eg: ‘F.R.Leavis takes a completely
different line to Hutchison on this matter. He argues x, y and z.’ This
helps to hold the whole essay together and makes it look like a well
balanced piece of writing.

12. LAYOUT OF QUOTATIONS

12.1 Very short quotations

Quotations of a few words should be incorporated into a sentence:

 Pip’s ‘great expectations’ prove to be not at all what he imagines.

or
 Joe’s repeated phrase, ‘what larks,’ represents his lack of
education as well as his affectionate, boyish relationship with Pip. 5

5
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (1861; repr. London: Everyman, 1994), p.193.

46
Always give a footnote the first time you quote from a text. There is no
need to footnote a title. If you have more than one quotation in a
sentence, give both references in the same footnote. Always place the
footnote number at the end of the sentence. A footnote reference
number should follow all punctuation.

12.2 Quotations of up to 40 words

These may also be incorporated into your text. They should be preceded
by a colon or comma when appropriate:

 Charles Dickens sets Pip’s story in a landscape similar to that of

his own childhood: ‘Ours was the marsh country, down by the river,
within, as the river wound, twenty miles of the sea.’

The colon or comma is not needed if a word such as that, which,

whether introduces the quotation. In this case, the quotation functions as
a subordinate clause, and is an integral part of the wider sentence. When
the quotation appears within a sentence, the final full stop should appear
outside the quotation marks, even if the full stop is part of the original
sentence. A page number in brackets should go inside the full stop when
the quotation is run on in the text:

 Charles Dickens sets Pip’s story in a landscape similar to that of

his own childhood. Pip tells the reader that ‘Ours was the marsh
country, down by the river, within, as the river wound, twenty miles
of the sea’ (GE, p.1).
or
 Pip believes Miss Havisham is the source of his ‘great
expectations’.

12.3 Quotations longer than 40 words

These should be set apart in an indented paragraph of their own. Leave

a line, indent the whole paragraph one tab space from the margin, and
set out the passage without quotation marks, except for those that may
appear in the passage quoted:

 Charles Dickens sets Pip’s story in a landscape similar to that of

his own childhood. He quickly connects Pip’s identity with this
landscape and with the day on with he meets Magwitch:

47
 Ours was the marsh country, down by the river, within, as the
river wound, twenty miles of the sea. My first most vivid and
broad impression of the identity of things, seems to me to
have been gained on a memorable raw afternoon towards
evening. (GE, p.1)

Footnote numbers and subsequent page references in brackets should

appear after the full stop for indented quotes. After an indented quote
there is no need to indent the first line of text, unless you intend to start a
new paragraph.

12.4 Quoting poetry

When quoting poetry, you should set it out as it appears in the original
text. Check the punctuation carefully; it may not be as you expect. If you
are quoting more than two lines, indent it and lay it out exactly as on the
page:

 Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth. (Frost, 1-5)

Give a footnote, as you would for prose, and include line numbers. I have
already quoted from ‘The Road Not Taken’ and given a footnote
reference on page 30, so here I am giving a subsequent reference (see
below). If you are quoting up to two lines, run it on in the text like a short
prose quote. Indicate line divisions with a slash:

 The speaker of Frost’s poem ends ambiguously with the statement

that he took the road ‘less traveled by, / And that has made all the
difference’ (lines 19-20). He invites the reader to imagine what this
difference is.

12.5 Ellipses

To signal that you have omitted a short section of a quote use ellipses in
square brackets […]. The brackets signal that these ellipses are yours:

 At such a time I found out for certain […] that the low leaden line
beyond was the river; and that the distant savage lair from which
the wind was rushing, was the sea; and that the small bundle of

48
 shivers growing afraid of it all and beginning to cry, was Pip. (GE,
p.1)

Make sure that the quote still makes grammatical sense in its own right.
You must also make sure that you do not corrupt the content of the
author’s original sentence. Only use ellipses to travel a short distance
within a text. Use it to join sections of the same sentence, or possibly
adjoining sentences. If you wish to quote clauses or phrases that are
further apart, do so in two separate quotations. Do not use ellipses to
indicate a large section of text which all seems relevant, but which you
cannot be bothered to sift through for the important phrases or
sentences:

X Charles Dickens sets Pip’s story in a landscape similar to that of

his own childhood. He quickly connects Pip’s identity with this
landscape and with the day on with he meets Magwitch: ‘My
father’s family […] beginning to cry, was Pip.’ (GE, p.1)

12.6 Make quotations make sense

Every quote must be integrated into the grammar of the sentence or

paragraph into which you wish to place it. Avoid dropping quotations into
a sentence as though in brackets, like this:

X Pip, whose sister, ‘I had cherished a profound conviction that her

bringing me up by hand, gave her no right to bring me up by jerks’,
does not treat him well, has an unhappy childhood.

This does not make grammatical sense. The quotation simply lands in
the middle of the sentence. This sentence would be better like this:

 Pip’s older sister contributes to his unhappy childhood. Even as a

small child, he is aware that her treatment of him is unfair. He
recalls: ‘I had cherished a profound conviction that her bringing me
up by hand, gave her no right to bring me up by jerks.’

Respect the text you are quoting. Take your time and use your sources
carefully. Write something that reads well.

49
13. REFERENCING: MHRA SYSTEM (FOOTNOTES)

Good referencing demonstrates that you care about the accuracy and
the reliability of your sources. It shows where your ideas come from, and
it allows your reader to check up on the accuracy of your source material
if required. It also shows that you are attentive to details, which gives
your argument more authority. People will always be more willing to
listen to your big ideas if you can get the small things right. So
referencing is a good chance to practise taking care with facts and
figures: another skill that you will find useful in all sorts of contexts.

13.1 Books

On first reference to a book, you should give a footnote in this format:

Author’s Name, Book Title in Italics (Place of Publication:

Publisher, Date), p.no.

Rules for primary and secondary sources are the same:

Bella Bathurst, The Lighthouse Stevensons (London: Harper

Collins, 2000), p.23.

Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1959; repr. London: Penguin, 2000),

p.47.

F. O. Matthiessen, ed., The Oxford Book of American Verse (New

York: Oxford University Press, 1950), p.556.

Robert Frost, The Poetry of Robert Frost, ed. by Edward Connery

Lathem (London: Cape, 1971; repr. 2001), p.105.

Anthony Trollope, Barchester Towers (1857; repr. London:

Penguin, 1994), p.399.

If you do not know where to find this information, open the cover of your
book, and turn over one or two, pages. On the left page opposite the title
page, or behind the title page, you will see some small type, which you
have possibly never stopped to look at before. This page gives you the
publication history of the text. Here you should find the three pieces of
information you need to fill the brackets: place of publication, publisher
and date. Sometimes these also appear on the title page. If several
places of publication appear, give the UK city. This is probably where the

50
book in your hand was printed, and sometimes there will be differences
between the US and UK editions of a text. If the text is a reprint, give
both the date of original publication and the date of the reprint. This will
probably mean the oldest and most recent dates you can find on this
page. See the Nabokov and Trollope examples above. If you are using a
collected edition, give both the author’s name and the editor’s name. See
the Frost reference above. It is only necessary to give an edition number
if the content is likely to differ significantly between editions. This is often
the case for reference books and collections of poetry.

13.2 Short Stories

Titles of short stories are placed in quotation marks to indicate that they
are not book titles. Give the details of the short story, followed by the
details of the book in which it appears, including the editor, if there is
one. Give the page numbers for the complete story, followed by the page
number for your quotation:

Author’s Name, ‘Title of Short Story’, in Title of Book, ed. by

Editor’s Name (Place: Publisher, Date), page numbers, p.no.

If the story has been reprinted in an anthology, you should also give the
original date of the story if you can find it:

Author’s Name, ‘Title of Short Story’ (original date); repr. in

Title of Anthology, ed. by Editor’s Name (Place: Publisher,
Date), page numbers, p.no.

Here are some examples:

Vernon Lee, ‘Winthrop’s Adventure’, in The Virago Book of

Victorian Ghost Stories, ed. by Richard Dalby (London: Virago,
1988), 105-134, p.127.

Ernest Hemingway, ‘A Pursuit Race’, in Men Without Women

(1928; repr. London: Arrow, 1994) 111-115, p.113.

Willa Cather, ‘A Death in the Desert’ (1905); repr. in The Oxford

Book of American Short Stories, ed. by Joyce Carol Oates (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1994), 264-284, p.275.

51
13.4 Plays

Play titles appear in italics. For a first footnote give a reference to the
edition or collection used:

William Shakespeare, Hamlet, in The Complete Works of

Shakespeare, 2 vols (New York: Nelson Doubleday, 1968), vol II,
Act II, Sc. 2, lines 24-34, p.611.

Brian Friel, Philadelphia, Here I Come (London: Faber, 1965), p.42.

For subsequent references give an abbreviated version of the title, if

necessary, followed by act, scene, and line numbers, if you have these.
For a modern play which has undivided acts, it often makes more sense
to give page numbers instead:

(Hamlet, II. 2. 24-34)

(Philadelphia, p.93)

13.5 Poems

Titles of short poems appear in quotations marks. It is not usually

necessary to cite a poem as a separate item in a footnote. Give a
reference to the collection of poems or anthology and the page number.
The exception to this would be a very long poem which was originally
published as a volume in its own right, such as Paradise Lost or In
Memoriam. This should follow the format for a play title as above. For
subsequent references to a poem, give line numbers rather than page
numbers.

13.6 Articles and chapters in books

These are cited much like short stories. Give the author and the title of
the article, followed by the book details:

Author’s Name, ‘Title of Article’, in Title of Book, ed. by

Editor’s Name (Place: Publisher, date), page numbers, p.no.

Philip Horne, ‘Henry James and the Invention of Novel Theory’, in

The Cambridge Companion to Henry James, ed. by Jonathan
Freedman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 79-
101, p.85.

52
If you wish to quote from an excerpt reprinted in a collection of source
material, give as much information as you can find about the original text,
followed by the information about the book you are using. This
information should be available in the footnotes or bibliography:

M. Eastwood, ‘The New Woman in Fiction and in Fact’,

Humanitarian, 5 (1894), 375-9; repr. in The Fin de Siecle: A
Reader in Cultural History c.1880-1900, ed. by Sally Ledger and
Roger Luckhurst (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 90-92,
p.90.

13.7 Articles in journals and newspapers

These follow a similar format, but the information about editor, place of
publication and publisher is not necessary. The title of the article appears
in quotation marks. The title of the journal or newspaper appears in
italics. For journals give the issue number followed by the year. For
newspapers or magazines, give the precise date without the brackets:

Author’s Name, ‘Title of Article’, Title of Journal, Volume

Number (Date), page numbers, p.no.

T. S. Eliot, ‘In Memory of Henry James’, Egoist, 5 (1918), 1-2, p.2.

Iain Sinclair, ‘Silence on the Euston Road’, London Review of

Books, 18 August 2005, 14-16, p.15.

Online journals should be cited in the same format as print journals.

However, you should also add the url address of the article and the date
on which you accessed the article:

Mark Van Wienen, ‘Poetics of the Frugal Housewife: A Modernist

Narrative of the Great War and America’. American Literary
History, 7 (1995), 55-91. http://links.jstor.org/ [Accessed 10
August 2013].

Many online journal articles now have a Digital Object Identifier (DOI),
which is like a digital barcode or serial number for electronic data. If you
have accessed the article online, you should also quote this DOI and
give the date when you read the article.

53
13.8 Websites

Give as much of the following information as you can find:

Author, ‘Title of Article’, <url location, http://www.>, date

Clark, S. N. ‘Virginia Woolf: A Short Biography’,

http://orlando.jp.org/VWSGB/dat/vwbiog.html (2000)

13.9 Films

Information in film references is separated by full points rather than

commas:

Title of Film. Director’s Name. Distributor. Date.

The Grapes of Wrath. Dir. John Ford. 20th Century Fox, 1940.

13.10 Bibliography

At the end of every essay give a bibliography. List works which you have
quoted or which have informed your thinking, even if you have only used
one or two texts. Do not list works which you have not read or which you
glanced at briefly. If you have more than three or four items in your
bibliography, it is helpful to divide the bibliography into primary texts and
secondary texts. Primary texts are the literary books or book on which
you have been writing. Secondary texts are the critical books about the
primary texts or their authors. This division is especially helpful with a
long piece of work such as an honours dissertation. References in a
bibliography follow the same format as footnotes with two exceptions.
The surname of the author is placed first, so that the items can easily be
put into alphabetical order. A bibliographic reference does not have a full
stop. If you have quoted several essays from a collection in the course of
your essay, you can simply list the collected edition in the bibliography.
Use a long dash to signal more than one text by a writer.

Here is an example of a short bibliography at the end of a comparative

essay on two texts by Virginia Woolf:

Primary texts

Woolf, Virginia, Mrs Dalloway (1925; repr. Oxford: Oxford Classics,

1998)

54
 — To the Lighthouse (1927; repr. London: Grafton, 1987)

Secondary texts

Bowlby, Rachel, Virginia Woolf: Feminist Destinations (Oxford:

Blackwell, 1988)

Clark, S. N. ‘Virginia Woolf: A Short Biography’,

http://orlando.jp.org/VWSGB/dat/vwbiog.html (2000)

Lee, Hermione, The Novels of Virginia Woolf (London: Methuen,

1977)

McNeillie, Andrew (ed.), The Essays of Virginia Woolf, 5 vols

(London: Hogarth Press, 1987), vol. II

Zwerdling, Alex, Virginia Woolf and the Real World (Berkeley:

University of California Press, 1986)

If there is more than one author or editor, list them in the order in which
they appear on the book. Only reverse the name of the first contributor.
The lists of further reading at the end of each section of this booklet are
set out in MHRA bibliography form. See these for more examples.

14. REFERENCING WITH HARVARD (AUTHOR-DATE)

The author-date system is widely used in some arts subjects and in

social sciences. This is often referred to as the Harvard system, as one
version of it originated at Harvard University. There are two parts to this
referencing system: a reference which goes in the text of the essay and
a reference list. The reference list should show all the works which have
been used to write your assignment, and is given at the end of the essay.
You may also include books which you have used but have not quoted
from.

In the text:
Each time information is used from one of these works, the writer of the
essay provides the following information in brackets in the text: the name
of the author, the date of the book or article used, and the relevant page
number. The reader of the essay can flip to the end of the essay to check
for more information if necessary.

55
 Try to place this reference close to the relevant material without
spoiling the shape of your sentence. Put it at the end of the sentence if
possible. References should be given in the following format:

(Author’s surname Year of publication)

For example: (Bernard 2000)

This is the same whether you are dealing with a book, an article or some
other kind of source. If there are two authors, give both surnames:

(Akroyd and Hughes 1992)

If there are more than two, give the first name then add, et al. in italics:

(Cloke et al. 2004)

If you have quoted directly from the text, you should also give a page
number:

(Smith 1983: 6)

If you have two items on your list published by the same author in the
same year, then mark these a, b, c, etc. in the reference list. You can
then refer to these clearly in the text:

(Bernard 2000a)
(Bernard 2000b)

If you are working with plays or long poems, it is often better to give a
line number rather than a page number. For plays which are divided into
scenes, give act, scene and line numbers. If these are not available give
a page number instead.

In the reference list:

At the end of the essay you should include a reference list, sometimes
called a ‘works-cited’ list, which contains the full bibliographic references
to all of your sources, like the one on pages 66-67. You can divide this
into primary and secondary sources, if appropriate. However, you should
not create separate sections for books, journals, or other types of source
material. Present your list in alphabetical order of the author’s surname.
The author’s name and initials should be reversed to make this order
clear. If there are two authors, place the item in the list according to the

56
surname of the first author. You should also reverse the name and
initials of all the authors. The format of the reference will vary slightly
depending of the type of publication. Take special care to get the
punctuation right.

14.1 Books

Put book titles in italics. List books using the following format:

Author. (Year). Title of book in italics. Place of publication:

publisher.

For example:

Bernard, H. R. (2000). Social Research Methods: Qualitative and

Quantitative Approaches. London: Sage Publications.

If you do not know where to find this information, open the cover of your
book and turn over one or two pages. On the left-hand page opposite the
title page, or behind the title page, you will see some small type, which
you have possibly never stopped to look at before. This page gives you
the publication history of the text. Here you should find the three pieces
of information you need to complete the reference: place of publication,
publisher and date. Sometimes these also appear on the title page. If
several places of publication appear, give the city closest to where you
are. This is probably where the book in your hand was printed, and
sometimes there are variations between the different national editions of
a text. If a book has two or more authors, list all of these as they appear
on the book. Remember to reverse the name and initial of each of the
authors:

Ackroyd, S. and Hughes, J. A. (1992). Data Collection in Context.

London: Longman.

Cloke, P., Cook, I., Crang, P., Goodwin, M., Painter, J. and Philo,
C. (2004). Practising Human Geography. London: Sage
Publications.

Translated books should give both author and translator:

Derrida, J. (1978). Writing and Difference. (A. Bass. Trans.)

Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (Originally published 1967.)

57
If you are citing a reprinted text, give the date of the reprint first and add
the date of original publication in brackets at the end. Look on the page
of the book which gives publication details and look for the most recent
date (reprint) and the earliest date (original publication) you can find:

Dickens, Charles. (1994). Great Expectations. London: Everyman.

(Originally published 1861).

14.2 Short stories and chapters in books

Titles of short stories, chapters or articles in edited books should be

given in quotation marks. When you reference a book chapter in the text,
give the name of the author of the chapter and the publication date. In
the reference list, cite the chapter first, followed by the reference
information for the book:

Author of article. (Year) ‘Title of article’. In editor of book (Ed.)

Title of book. Place of publication: publisher, page numbers
of article.

For example:

Conklin, H.C. (1968). ‘Ethnography’. In D. L. Sills (Ed.)

International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. New York:
Macmillan, 172-8.

14.3 Articles in journals

Titles of articles should also be given in quotation marks. Titles of

journals are given in italics like book titles. Give the information for the
article, followed by the information for the journal:

Author. (Year). ‘Title of article in quotation marks’. Title of

journal in italics, Volume no. Page numbers of article.

For example:

Smith, J. K. (1983). ‘Quantitative Versus Qualitative Research: An

Attempt to Clarify the Issue’. Educational Researcher, 12. 6-13.

Some users of the author-date system omit the quotation marks, but
these are useful because they clarify where the title of the article ends

58
and the journal title begins. Give the title of the article in full, even if it is a
long one. Always list all the authors if there are two or more.

14.4 Electronic journals

Online journals should be cited in the same format as print journals.

However, you should also add the url address of the article and the date
on which you accessed the article:

Author. (Year). ‘Title of article’. Title of journal, volume number

(and part), pages numbers. <url address> [Accessed date].

For example:

Van Wienen, M. (1995). ‘Poetics of the Frugal Housewife: A

Modernist Narrative of the Great War and America’. American
Literary History, 7 (1), 55-91. http://links.jstor.org/ [Accessed 10
August 2013].

Many online journal articles now have a Digital Object Identifier (DOI),
which is like a digital barcode or serial number for electronic data. If you
have accessed the article online, you should also quote this DOI and
give the date when you read the article.

14.5 Websites

If you are referencing online material that is not published as a journal

article you should give as much of the following information as you can
find:

Author. (Year). ‘Title of article’. Title of web publication. Place

of publication: publisher. <url address> [Accessed date].

For example:

Cornwall, N. (2006). ‘The Aspern Papers’. The Literary

Encyclopedia. The Literary Dictionary Company.
http://www.litencyc.com/ [Accessed 10 August 2007].

Websites vary in the amount of information they give. However, reliable

websites usually make this information easily available. If you cannot find

59
any of this information, you should ask yourself whether the website is a
usable academic source. You will find some of this information very hard
to find on big internet encyclopedias such as Wikipedia and Questia.

14.6 Newspaper articles

Cite newspaper and magazine articles in a format similar to journal

articles:

Author. (Year). ‘Title of article’. Title of newspaper, date of

publication, page number.

For example:

Elliot, L. and Wintour, P. (2007). ‘Bush agrees to CO2 cut, with

strings attached’. The Guardian, 8 June 2007, p.2.

14.7 Films

Film, TV and other media should be referenced in the following format:

Title of film in italics. (Date of release). Type of material.

Director or equivalent. Place of production: distributor.

For example:

The Grapes of Wrath. (1940). Film. Directed by John Ford. USA:

Twentieth Century Fox.

14.8 Plays

Titles of plays are given in italics, even if they appear in a collected

volume. Otherwise, reference a play the same way as a book.

Author. (Year). Title of Play. Place of publication. Publisher.

For example:

Miller, Arthur. (1953). The Crucible. London: Penguin.

60
14.9 Graphs and charts

Graphs and charts should be referenced as carefully as textual material.

Give a reference immediately under the graph, naming the source of
your information. List the document in which you found this information in
the reference list. If you have used more than one source in compiling
your own graph or chart, then cite both of these in the bracketed
reference and cite these separately in the reference list, for example:

Office of National Statistics. (1999). Key population and Vital

Statistics, Local and Health Authority Areas. London: Stationary
Office.

General Register Office Scotland. (2000). 2000-Based Population

projections for Scottish Areas. http://www/gro-
scotland.gov.uk/grosweb.nsf/pages/

15. PLAGIARISM

The University defines plagiarism as ‘the use, without adequate

acknowledgement, of the intellectual work of another person in work
submitted for assessment’. It may have been acceptable to copy and
paste text from internet sources into a project at school, but at university
we want you to be careful and transparent about all the sources which
you use. All information should be traceable back to a reliable source.
We are keen for you to explore outside sources, but you must show
where you found your information. Plagiarism is the deliberate failure to
do this. If you have copied something, even a short phrase, word for
word out of a book, or if you have copied and pasted anything from an
internet site, you must put it in quotation marks and give a reference.
Changing one or two words, or paraphrasing a sentence does not
release you from the obligation to name your sources. If you summarise
someone else’s argument, make sure that your marker can see what you
are doing. Make sure that your own opinions emerge distinctly as well:

 Ernest Jones argues that Hamlet’s behaviour can all be traced

back to his repressed desire for his mother. Hamlet’s confusion
about his feelings towards his father and his uncle are due to his
jealousy at their relationship with Gertrude. However, this seems

61
 implausible, as Hamlet clearly loves and reveres his father, a detail
which Jones fails to fit into his Freudian reading (Jones 1949).

This make it clear which ideas are Jones’s and which are the writer’s.

Academics do not just regard plagiarism as laziness or cheating.

They see it as a form of stealing. Academics make their living by having
ideas. If you use these ideas without giving credit for them, it is a bit like
having a meal in a restaurant without paying. Plagiarism is regarded as a
serious offence in a university. Students who are caught are called up in
front of the Head of School and sometimes the University Court. Serial
offenders will be expelled from the university. To a marker, it is often
obvious if a phrase or a whole paragraph has been lifted from an outside
source. English lecturers are astute, sensitive readers who have devoted
their lives to analysing variations in style and tone. If you can find
something on the internet in five minutes, your marker can get a funny
feeling about it and Google it just as fast. The stupid thing is that the
effort required to plagiarise effectively is probably about the same
amount of effort required to use the same sources in an argument and
reference them properly. There is information about avoiding plagiarism
in every course guide, in the Student Handbook and on the English
website. Every time you hand in an essay, you sign a declaration on the
cover sheet saying that you have read and understand the rules. Make
sure that you have.

Students often worry about how to incorporate information from

lectures and seminars into their written work. Information given in a
lecture becomes public knowledge. Feel free to use it in your work; that
is what it is for. There is no need to cite it formally. However, lecturers do
not like to see their own phrases parroted back to them in written work.
Apart from anything else, this makes them suspicious that you have not
done much other reading on the subject. If you can digest the information
given in lectures and express it in your own words, your lecturer will feel
that they have done a good job. If you want to use a quote from a class
handout, look it up in the library, or email the lecturer and ask where you
can find it. Do not cite the handout as though it were a published text.

If you have an inspired idea about a text, only to find that some
clever critic got there first, do not panic. There are very few truly original
ideas. The fact that someone else wrote it down and got it published
shows that you are thinking along the right lines. Using this idea is not
plagiarism, but the smart thing to do here is to use the critic to back you
up. This makes you look better, not worse.

62
 Hamlet’s relationships with women are all problematic. His
supposed romance with Ophelia never demonstrates any shared
affection or sexual attraction. He is unnaturally close to his mother,
which complicates his relationship with his uncle, as Ernest Jones
points out in his Freudian reading of the play (Jones 1949).

Name your sources. Give references. Show your knowledge.

Further Reading

Hutchison, Hazel. (2010). Write Great Essays and Dissertations. London:

Hodder. (Originally published 2007).

MHRA Style Guide online

http://www.mhra.org.uk/Publications/Books/StyleGuide/

Neville, Colin. (2007). The Complete Guide to Referencing and Avoiding

Plagiarism. Maidenhead: Open University Press.

Price, Glanville, MHRA Style Book, 6th ed. (London: Modern Humanties
Research Association, 2002)

63
And finally…

Good writing is a skill that takes years to develop. As with playing a

musical instrument or training for a sport, there is always something new
to learn, or a different approach to explore. This booklet is designed to
give you some basic advice to help with your written work at university.
However, a love of language and an interest in the way words work can
last a lifetime. You will find that these are useful tools for life, which will
open up the world around you in surprising ways. Keep reading, and
keep writing.
HH

64
 Quick Fix: Sources

1. Leave yourself a realistic amount of time to find useful books in the

library. It may take a whole day to find what you need. This is an
important part of studying. Consider this a good day’s work, not a waste
of time.

2. Do not limit yourself to the recommended reading in the course guide.

There are thousands of books in the University Library. Dozens of these
will be of interest to you. Think creatively about your question, and keep
looking until you find something that is useful.

3. Use your sources to back up your argument. Name the critics in your
work, so that your marker can see who said what. This helps your idea
to emerge more clearly.

4. You do not need to agree with everything you read. An essay that has
some sort of debate going on within it is much more interesting than a
sequence of similar ideas or viewpoints.

5. Give accurate references. Account for all the information you use, and
follow the correct referencing conventions for different kinds of text.

6. Use internet sources with caution. Only use information from good
sites. Much of the information on the internet is unreliable. If you cannot
be sure of what you have found, do not use it. Never cut and paste from
the internet into your essay without giving a reference.

7. Give references in brackets in the text. For poems and plays give line
numbers.

8. Provide a reference list, even if you only have one or two books to list. It
looks professional and is a good habit to form.

9. Avoid plagiarism. If you give good references and account for all the
information you use, this will not be a problem.

10. Show your knowledge. Your marker wants to see what you have been
reading and what you have learned.

65
Reference List

(This list is given in Harvard style.)

Abrams, M. H. (1996). A Glossary of Literary Terms. London:

Wadsworth. (Originally published 1941).

Austen, Jane. (1996). Pride and Prejudice. London: Penguin. (Originally

published 1813).

Burchfield, R. W. (Ed.) (1998). Fowler’s Modern English Usage. Third

edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Dickens, Charles. (1994). Great Expectations. London: Everyman.

(Originally published 1861).

Frost, Robert. (2001). The Poetry of Robert Frost. Ed. by Edward

Connery Lathem. London: Cape. (Originally published 1971).

Gee, Robyn and Watson, Carol. (2004). Usborne Guide to Better

English: Grammar, Spelling and Punctuation. London: Usborne.

Hennesey, Brendan. (2002). Writing an Essay. Oxford: How to Books.

Hutchison, Hazel. (2010). Write Great Essays and Dissertations. London:

Hodder. (Originally published 2007).

Jones, Ernest. (1949). Hamlet and Oedipus. New York: Norton.

MHRA Style Guide online

http://www.mhra.org.uk/Publications/Books/StyleGuide/

Mounsey, Chris. (2002). Essays and Dissertations. Oxford: Oxford

University Press.

Neville, Colin. (2007). The Complete Guide to Referencing and Avoiding

Plagiarism. Maidenhead: Open University Press.

Peck, John and Coyle, Martin. (2002) Literary Terms and Criticism.
Houndmills: Palgrave.

66
Peck, John. (1985). Practical Criticism: How to Write a Critical
Appreciation. Houndmills: Palgrave.

Price, Glanville, MHRA Style Book, 6th ed. (London: Modern Humanties
Research Association, 2002)

Ritter, R. M. (Ed.) (2000). The Oxford Dictionary for Writers and Editors.
Second edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Sinclair, Christine. (2007). Grammar: A Friendly Approach. Maidenhead:

Open University Press.

Shakespeare, William. (1968). Hamlet. In The Complete Works of

Shakespeare, 2 vols. New York: Nelson Doubleday.

Strunk, William and White, E. B. (1999). The Elements of Style. London:

Longman.

Truss, Lynne. (2003). Eats, Shoots and Leaves: The Zero-Tolerance

Approach to Punctuation. London: Profile Books.

67
 INDEX
Items followed by a number are subsection headings.

Agreement, 8.2 34
Antecedents 37 Films, citing, 13.9 54, 60
Apostrophes, 7.1 20 Form 8
Articles, citing, Font 14
In books, 13.6 52, 58
In journals, 13.7 53, 58 Gender 9
Finding 44 Grammar, 8 30-37

Bibliography, 13.10 54 Internet 44

Books, citing 50, 57 Plagiarism and 61
Citing 54, 59
Capitals, 9.3 40 Introductions, 3.2 11
CAS scale 15 Irony 9
Clauses, 8.1 30
Commas in 24 Journals 44
Collective nouns 35 Citing 53, 59
Colons, 7.4 27
Commas, 7.2 21 Layout,
Comma splice 22, 25 Of essay, 4 14
Comparative essay 8 Of quotation, 12 46
Compound sentence 22 Lists
Conclusions, 3.2 11 Commas in 23
Conjunctions 22 Semi colons in 26
Connective adverbs 22 Colons before 27
Contraction, 21 Literary theory 8, 43
Critical analysis 8
Criticism Main clauses 30
Acknowledging 45 Margins 14
Challenging 45 Modifiers 32
Reading 18
Sources 45 Object of sentence 30
Omniscient narrator 9
Dangling elements 32
Dashes, 7.5 28 Narrative voice 9
Double-spacing 14
Dramatic irony 9 Paragraphs, 3.4 13
Parenthesis 23
Exclamation marks 29 Participle 31
Periodicals 44

68
Perspective 9 Speech
Plagiarism, 15 61-63 Commas before 24
Planning 6-17 Colons before 25
Point of View 9 Quotation marks 29
Possession, 7.1 20 Spelling, 9 38-40
Plays, citing 52, 60 Errors, 9.1 39
Plurals US v UK, 9.3 40
Poems, citing, 13.5 21 Structure, 3 10-14
Practical criticism 8 Reading for 6
Predicate of sentence 30 Criticism and 46
Principal verb 30 Style
Pronouns, 8.4 37 Reading for 6
Indefinite 35 Referencing 2, 50, 55
Possessive 21 Subheadings, 3.3 13
Punctuation, 7 19-29 Submission, 5 15
Subordinate clauses 24, 30-31
Questions, 2 7 Subject of sentence 30
Understanding 8
At top of essay 14 Tenses, 8.3 36
Quotations In essays 19
Commas before 24 Theory 8
Colons before 25 Tragedy/Tragic 9
Ellipses in, 12.5 49
Layout of, 12 46-49 Voice 9
Poetry, 12.4 48 Websites, 13.9 54,59
Quotation marks, 7.6 29
Word count 15
Reading
For writing, 1 6
The question, 2 7
Referencing,
With footnotes 50
With author-date 55
Register, 6 18
Relative clause 33-34
Return of work 15
Semi-colons, 7.3 26
Sentence fragment 31-32
Short stories, citing 51, 58
Slang 18
Sources 33-65
Choosing, 10 43
Using, 11 45

69