Gwendolyn B.Bennett

Your Name

LIT ###, Section #

Prof.

Date

“Their Hand is mended by the Endeavor”: Guidelines for Writing and Formatting a Paper

By reading this essay carefully, you should be able to learn most of what you need to know to turn in a properly formatted literature paper. Our library also has an MLA style guide on its website. Please do not be afraid to ask me if you have any questions that are not answered here.

The title for this essay provides a good guide for creating a title for your papers. First, take a reasonably sized, relevant quotation—a quotation that you use in the essay itself — (“Their Hand is mended by the Endeavor”) followed by a colon, then announce your theme (Guidelines for Writing and Formatting a Paper), and provide the author and title of the work you’ll be discussing. As an example, here is the title of a paper I presented at a conference:

“Out of place and alien”: Immigration, Race, and American Identity in F. Scot Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby.

I repeat: the quotation in your title must also appear in the body of your essay.

As you can see, this paper has a reasonable font size and margins. Your computer’s default settings will probably be just fine. Some standard fonts are Times, Times New Roman, and Palatino, and twelve points is a good font size to use. Please double space your entire paper, and be sure to indent your paragraphs (five spaces). Do not put extra line spacing between your paragraphs. A new paragraph is indicated by an indentation, not by additional spacing. In other words, do not do this between paragraphs:

In literary studies, when we refer to “sources,” we mean the texts that are quoted, paraphrased, used, and/or cited in a paper. The two most basic kinds of sources are “primary” and “secondary” (or “outside”). Primary sources are the novels, plays, poems, short stories, essays, etc. that are the focus of your discussion. Secondary or outside sources are the scholarly works, electronic resources, and other material you might use when supporting your claims. Both types of sources (primary and secondary) are also referred to as “evidence.”

Using MLA style, you must acknowledge the source for all ideas and phrases that are not your own. Electronic sources must be cited. Failure to cite your sources may result in the charge of plagiarism. (Please see the John Jay College student handbook for more on plagiarism.) A quotation—whether a word, a phrase, or a sentence—should correspond exactly to its source in spelling, capitalization, and interior punctuation. Any deviation must be shown in brackets [ ]. If you summarize or paraphrase an author, you must still provide a citation.

You will use in-text citations for papers in my class. The basic format for a citation is the author's last name and the page number(s), which you place inside parentheses. For example, if you were to quote “use in-text citations” from this paragraph, which I have written, the in-text citation would look like this: (McKible 2). Do not use footnotes for citations, and always be sure to cite the author of the work—not the editor.

There are specific rules for quoting various amounts of text, and you should follow these rules. When quoting fewer than 50 words, incorporate the quotation into your prose, and include the citation information within the punctuation of the sentence. For example, a quotation from Benjamin Franklin would look like this: “As those who aim at perfect Writing by imitating the engraved Copies, tho’ they never reach the wish’d for Excellence of those Copies, their Hand is mended by the Endeavor, and is tolerable while it continues fair and legible” (Franklin 220). Please note two things from this passage. First, as you can see, the period comes at the very end of the sentence, not inside the quotation mark. If the original passage ends with an exclamation mark or a question mark, the end of the citation would look like this: “and legible?” (Franklin 220). I also want you to note that the title of this essay is drawn from the Franklin quotation. I used the quotation in my essay, so it can also be used in the title.

Online sources reproduced in your essay generally look the same. The following quotation is from a website: “Many know the story of Hurston’s resurrection by Alice Walker in 1975 with her publication of ‘In Search of Zora Neal Hurston’ in Ms. magazine” (Daley). If paragraph numbers are provided by the web source, your citation should look like this: (Daley par. 7). Citations from a database such as JSTOR look like this: "Jay Gatsby, a mysterious, rich man with some vague connections to bootlegging and the mob, is Nick's neighbor" (McAdams 654). If you cut and paste a quotation from a website, be sure that the font, size, and color match the rest of your essay.

When you quote a passage of more than 50 words, you should use a block quotation. The whole passage will be double-spaced, indented five spaces from the left, and will not have quotation marks. The citation information is given outside the punctuation of a block quotation. Here is how a longer passage from W. E. B. Du Bois’s book, The Souls of Black Folk, looks:

The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line,—the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea. It was a phase of this problem that caused the Civil War; and however much they who marched South and North in 1861 may have fixed on the technical points of union and local autonomy as a shibboleth, all nevertheless knew, as we know, that the question of Negro slavery was the real cause of the conflict. (45)

You should almost always follow a quotation of this length with your own explanation of it. This generally means that you will not indent a new paragraph directly following a block quotation. A good rule of thumb is that your analysis should take up approximately as much space as your quotation; ten lines of quotation should be followed by about ten lines of explanation.

After a text has been properly cited the first time, you can cite subsequent references with page numbers only—as long as the source of the quotation is perfectly clear. For example, now that Benjamin Franklin has been referred to and cited, you can discuss ideas about pride by writing that Franklin would “probably [be] proud of [his] vanity” (222). As you can see, I have provided only the page number after the quotation.

You should follow the same basic rules when you quote poetry or plays. Quotations of one to three lines or less should be incorporated into your prose, and you should use a space, a slash, and another space to indicate a line break. Thus, in Book Ten of The Iliad, Homer describes the following scene between Odysseus and Dolon: "But the shrewd tactician kept on pressing: 'Be precise. / Where are they sleeping? Mixed in with the Trojans? / Separate quarters? Tell me. I must know'" (10. 490-2). Note how the citation indicates the book and lines, but not page numbers. The author's name was not included in the citation because Homer was already named in the text. When quoting four or more lines of poetry, use a block quotation, and follow the rules outlined above. Here is part of a stanza from T. S. Eliot’s poem, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”:

And indeed there will be time

To wonder, ‘Do I dare?’ and, ‘Do I dare?’

Time to turn back and descend the stair,

With a bald spot in the middle of my hair—

(They will say: ‘How his hair is growing thin!’)

My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin . . .

(37-41)

As you can see, there are quotation marks inside the block quotation, but I did not add any around the passage as a whole. I have reproduced two examples from poetry here, but the same rules also apply to plays.

If you wish to omit a phrase or a sentence in a passage you are quoting, indicate the omission with an ellipsis. If the omission occurs . . . mid-sentence, use three dots and punctuate it as in this sentence. If the omission occurs at the end of a sentence or between sentences, use four dots, like this. . . . Then go on.

Do not italicize, bold, or underline any part of a quotation unless these elements appear in the original source.

Quoting accurately and according to expected norms is important. It is also necessary to indicate titles correctly. You should italicize the titles of long works such as novels, plays, epic poems, and films, for example: The Souls of Black Folk or The Iliad. Use quotation marks for the titles of shorter works such as short stories, lyric poems, and essays. Therefore, you would indicate Anne Bradstreet’s poem by writing “The Author to Her Book.” You do not need to bold or fully CAPITALIZE anything, so do not do it. And, please—whatever you do—do not throw the entire kitchen sink in when you indicate a title. The Great Gatsby and “The Author to Her Book” work just fine. “THE GREAT GATSBY” is just plain excessive and will undoubtedly incur my wrath.

You should generally use present tense when writing about literature. For example, when discussing Jay Gatsby’s identity in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, you would write something like: “The other characters do not know about Gatsby’s humble origins, and they suspect the worst of him because of their ignorance.” Do the same when you talk about an author’s control over the material: “Fitzgerald demonstrates just how dangerous ignorance can be.” Use past tense when referring to historical phenomena: “Fitzgerald wrote The Great Gatsby in the 1920s, while Prohibition was the law of the land.”

I have a few more general pieces of advice. You are writing a formal essay, not a letter to a friend. Therefore, do not make your paper a record of informal speech, do not use slang, and do not use contractions such as “don’t” and “isn’t.” Before you submit a paper to me via Turnitin.com, please print the essay and proofread it. “Eventhough” is not one word. Know the difference between “apart” and “a part.” There is no acceptable excuse for shoddy work. The Writing Center is designed to help you hand in excellent work, so feel free to visit the Center before turning in your paper.

Finally, the end of your paper should include a list of texts referred to in the body of your essay. The basic format is: Author’s Name. Title. Place of Publication: Publisher, Date. Type (Print, Web, Film, etc.). Your citations should be in alphabetical order. Do not number them. Use a hanging indentation for your citations. Now all you need to do is write your paper—good luck!

References

Bradstreet, Ann. "The Author to Her Book." 1678. Backpack Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, Drama, and Writing. Eds. X. J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia. 3rd ed. New York: Longman, 2010. 399-400. Print.

Daley, Christine. “A rocky road to posterity: The publication of Zora Neale Hurston.” Women Writers: A Zine. Sept. 2000. Web. 25 July 2011.

Du Bois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. Boston: Bedford, 1997. Print.

Eliot, T. S. "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." 101 Great American Poems. Eds. The American Poetry and Literacy Project. Mineola, NY: Dover, 1998. 66-70. Print.

Franklin, Benjamin. The Autobiography. 1818. The Harper Single Volume American Literature Ed. Donald McQuade et al. 3rd ed. New York: Longman, 1999. 184-222. Print.

Fitzgerald, F. S. The Great Gatsby. 1922. New York: Scribner, 1995. Print.

Homer. The Iliad. Trans. Robert Fagles. New York: Penguin, 1995. Print.

McAdams, Tony. "The Great Gatsby as a Business Ethics Inquiry." Journal of Business Ethics 12: (1993): 653-660. JSTOR. Web. 25 July 2011.