Things to be Aware of When Writing Your Essays for ENGL 2030

Dr. David Lavery

·         A Frag, a CS, or an FS on your essay indicates a Fragment, Comma Splice or Fused Sentence respectively; these are serious grammatical errors which indicate your inability to recognize the nature of a sentence.

·         All references to the actions which take place in a work of literature should be in present tense; "Miss Brill puts her fur piece back in its box" not "Miss Brill put her fur piece back in its box."

·         Although you may, in my class at least, use first person, you need not say "I think," "I believe," or "In my opinion."

·         An ellipsis, indicating the deliberate omission of some part of a quotation, is three spaced dots ( . . . ) or if the omitted quoted matter comes at the end of a sentence, it should be four spaced dots, one being the period.

·         Do not ever (ever) give me a paper recycled from another class.

·         Do not give me sentences such as this: "Walt Whitman perceived America as well as Americans to be of the greatest people as well as places to write poetry." They give me a migraine.

·         Do not throw a quotation into the midst of your essay. Your reader should always be able to tell who the speaker is and what the context of the quotations is. A brief introductory phrase or clause will usually suffice. See the sample essay.

·         Documentation. No need for a works cited page if the only work cited is the text book. Just give the page number (in parenthesis--see below) for the material quoted/cited. If citing a poem, give the line numbers (see the sample essay).

·         Don’t refer to writers by their first name. It’s Faulkner and Dickinson, not Bill and Emily.

·         If you are going to misspell words misspell consistently; do not have "Edgar Allen Poe’ on the first page and "Edger Allan Poe" on the second.

·         In a block quote, there is no need for q. marks (unless they are in the original).

·         In a formal essay do not address the reader as "you": "As you can see." A better choice is to say "As we can see."

·         In your introductory paragraph, you should (a) identify the piece of literature by author and title, (b) give significant details of setting, character, and plot, or other pertinent information that the reader of your essay should know to understand the context of your argument, (c) state your central idea (thesis), and (d) suggest the importance of your thesis to the reader’s general understanding of the piece of literature.

·         No need for title pages. Just put your name, the name and the date in the upper left-hand corner; your title should be centered.

·         One or two lines of poetry are to be incorporated within quotation marks into the text of your prose. When you quote two lines of poetry, be sure to separate the lines by a slash (/) with a space before and after the slash. See sample essays

·         Peter Elbow, writing guru extraordinaire, once compared giving a teacher a paper full of errors (especially errors which might have been corrected by good proofreading) to throwing dirty socks in your mother’s face and saying "wash these." I hate doing laundry.

·         Please number your pages.

·         Prose quotations of more than four typed lines are usually introduced by a colon or a comma and always set off from your text by beginning a new line and indenting ten spaces from the left-hand margin. When you present a quotation in this manner, use quotation marks only if your source uses them and exactly as your source uses them. Ordinarily, an indented quotation does not require quotation mark around it. Three or more lines of poetry are usually introduced by a colon or a comma and always are set off from your text by beginning a new line, indenting ten spaces from the left-hand margin, and reproducing the lines exactly as they appear in the text (line endings, indentations, spacing, capitals, etc.). See the example in item 6 above. 

·         The presence of material in parentheses delays punctuation until after the closing parenthesis.

·         The titles of novels, plays, and feature films are underlined or italicized, while the titles of short stories and poems are placed in quotation marks: Walker’s novel The Color Purple (or The Color Purple), Spielberg’s film The Color Purple (or The Color Purple), Shakespeare’s play Othello (or Othello), Crane’s short story "The Open Boat," Kumin’s poem "Woodchucks."

·         The University Writing Center is in now located in the Walker Library.

·         To convince your reader that your thesis is valid, you need to support important generalizations and observations with specific examples and quotations from the piece of literature about which you are writing.

·         Try to avoid third grade spelling errors like "it’s" for the possessive and "its" for the contraction.

·         When citing page numbers inclusively in the text, there is no need for "p" or "pg"; thus (24), not (p. 24).

·         Your paper must have a title which indicates the subject of your paper. Do not make your title = the title of the work you are writing about. "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" is unacceptable. "Peeling Labels in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" is acceptable.