Paper Format

Name the computer file using the following format: 9999999.13186.1

That is your student I.D. number, followed by the course number, and a 1 (for paper number 1).

Do not use a separate title page. Simply put your I.D. number (in place of your name), the class, and the date in the upper righthand corner of the page, thus:

9999999

ENGL 13186

1/25/06

Use 12 point type, standard margins, and double space.

Number your pages!

How to Cite a Text

When you are quoting from one of the texts assigned for the class, you do not need to give full bibliographical information (i. e. publisher, year etc.). You need to cite only the appropriate lines or pages (see below). If it is clear what text you are quoting, you do not need to give the title or author. If it is not clear, then you should cite the title of the text along with the lines, page, or other appropriate citation.

If you are citing a poem, cite the lines.

If you are citing a story or novel, cite the page number.

If you are citing a play, cite the act, scene, and lines, if provided; otherwise cite the page.

The proper format for quotations is as follows. Note in particular the differences between punctuation of short quotations and longer ones.

Short Quotations

If the quotation is five lines or fewer, they should be quoted in the body of your paragraph, so that I might quote Browning’s lines: “That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall, / Looking as if she were alive” (1-2).

Note that you use a slash (/) to separate lines of poetry, and you need only give the line numbers, not the word “lines” or abbreviation “ll.”

Note also the order of the punctuation of the end of the quotation; it goes: quotation mark, parentheses, period. When citing a play that is in verse, such as Hamlet, you should also treat the lines like poetry, separating them by slashes. Quotations of prose are treated the same, but without the slashes.

Long Quotations

If the quotation is longer than five lines, then cite them as an indented block quotation as follows:

The Boy, crouched on his nail keg at the back of the crowded room, knew he smelled cheese . . . he could see the ranked shelves close-packed with the solid, squat, dynamic shapes of tin cans whose labels his stomach read, not from the lettering which meant nothing to his mind but from the scarlet devils and the silver curve of fish . . . the smell and sense just a little of fear because mostly of despair and grief, the old fierce pull of blood. (“Barn Burning” 3)

Note that you do not use quotation marks, and that the period precedes the citation of page or lines. When quoting five or more lines of verse, indent and make the quotation look as close to the original as possible:

Over the half-finished houses

night comes. The builders

stand on the roof. It is

quiet after the hammers,

the pulleys hang slack. (Rich, “The Roofwalker” 1-5)

Blending Your Prose with the Author’s

• Introductory sentence and quote: Instead of writing “Emma implies that Harriet Smith would not be her friend if she married Mr. Martin. She states: ‘I could not have visited Mrs. Martin’” (33), write: “Emma implies that Harriet Smith would not be her friend if she married Mr. Martin: ‘I could not have visited Mrs. Martin’” (33).

• Merging your sentence with the quote: Be certain that the relationship between your sentence and that of the quotation is grammatical. Sometimes it works better to use part of the original sentence. For example, you would write: “When John Reed claims that ‘all the house belongs’ to him, he is asserting his patriarchal rights” rather than “When John Reed claims that ‘they are mine, all the house belongs to me,’ he is asserting his patriarchal rights.” Make certain that, as with all sentences, verb tenses and subject and verb agree.

Note that in these examples, I have put the quotations from the text in single quotation marks, because they quotations within quotations. In your essays, you would, as usual, use double quotation marks.