1. Author's Names and Characters' Names. As a general rule, when you refer to an author (or indeed any person) in a paper, you should use the full name the first time you refer to him or her; after that, you can use just his or her last name. Indeed, whether you're writing about literature or not, this rule applies generally: first cite, full name; after that, last name only is fine. In writing about literary characters, however, slightly different nuances apply. Characters have slightly different rules. Often you can often do best by following the lead of the story or text you're writing about. That is, if your author refers to a character as "Billie," generally you can too. Try to be sure, of course, that you differentiate characters clearly. For instance, you can refer to Charley Wales" as "Wales," as long as you refer to his daughter "Honoria Wales" as "Honoria." (In fact, it's customary to refer to children by their first names.) Be aware that the simplest of departures from these conventions can be misunderstood as an attempt on your part to be sarcastic (e.g. call a person by his or her first name, and it could sound condescending; use only a title, like "The Senator," and it sounds like you're making fun of him or her. Call a woman only by her first name, and that can seem sexist).
2. Abbreviations. Generally, abbreviations are to be avoided in college essays, with the exception of the titles you see before and after proper names (for example, "Dr." or "M.D."), names of familiar organizations ("N.A.A.C.P.," "F.B.I."), or conventions noting time or dates (B.C. or A.M.)--not, however, for months (that is, don't use "Jan." for "January"). "Etc." is never used, since the entire question is--what's left in etc.? (For some of those organizations, as well, you can omit the periods (e.g. just "FBI").
3. When using numbers, spell out any number that takes only one or two words (e.g. "thirty-eight"). The general exceptions are for dates, addresses, times of day, or instances where numbers are used for technical measurement or identification (e.g. "Flight 800").
4. Learn the rules about
underlining, italics and quotation marks. When I use the
code "ITAL" in the margin of your paper, it means that you've violated a
rule about italicizing. As a good rule
of thumb, anything that can hold within it shorter selections or elements
is underlined or put in italics. Underline or italicize, then, the titles of books, magazines, newspapers, television
series (like Starter Wife). Italics or underlining are interchangeable:
it print, that is, sometimes underlining appears as italics
or the other way around. Meanwhile, those shorter selections--poems,
articles, chapters, specific TV episodes that can appear inside things
that are underlined--should be presented inside double quotation marks (" ").
No need to put quotation marks around your own title, or around indented passages.
The only time indented passages have quotation marks around them
is if you're citing dialogue
5. Where to place puncutuation marks in relation to each other? In general, the most important dimension of this rule is whether or not you're citing page numbers. That is, when you're not citing page numbers, always put periods and commas inside quotation marks; put colons and semicolons outside them; put question marks inside the quotes if you're quoting a question, outside if you're turning a statement into a question yourself. But when you are citing page numbers, put the page number citation, which normally appears in parenthesis, afteryour quotation mark and then with closing punctuation. So, for instance, you might write: Didion calls her ideal "self-respect" (27); here she means not submitting to the "demands of others" (27).
6. When quoting four our more lines of another text, set the quote off from the body of your text by indenting ten spaces from the left, and introducing the quote with a colon (:). For me, you can single space that quote, though some professors will ask you to double space it.
7. Verb tenses are tricky when
writing about literature. Generally, the convention is that you refer to
a "text" in the present tense: thus, "Dickens writes" or "Dickens
describes...." But when you are describing the historical context
or moment in which an author lived or conceived of that text, the past
tense is often more appropriate. As in any college essay, the important
thing here is to be consistent.
8. Punctuating passages is also
tricky. Many students become confused by the fact that works of fiction
often introduce a piece of dialogue with a comma--thus, "Bounderby replied,
'I never have.'" But when writing your own prose, in fact you do not
need this comma--indeed, you can punctuate an author's passage as if it
were your own prose, in any given sentence. Thus you can omit a comma,
a question mark, and so on if your own sentence doesn't need it. The
safest thing to do, however, is to use brackets to indicate any addition
you make to the passage. For instance, if you take a capital letter
and make it small case, you would do as follows: By the end of the text,
however, he calls Bounderby "[d]eflated." Even if the word was "Deflated"
in the original."
If you have questions, you can email me by clicking here:wilsonc@bc.edu