Style Sheet:  A Guide to Format, Documentation, & Writing

 This is a sample first page of a research paper.  Note:

1.         No title pages.  Create headings for the first pages in the top left-hand corner listing your name, the instructor’s name, the course and section number, and the due date.  List these items on separate, double-spaced lines.

2.         Do use titles.  Titles should be an original and specific phrase that conveys your paper’s main point.  Center titles a double-space below the last lines of your headings and above introductory paragraphs.  Do not underline title or put them in quotation marks or type them in all caps of even use a bold-face or italic font. 

3.         Number all pages.  Create headers in the top right-hand corners of every page, including first pages.  These headers will consist of your last name and the page number.  A space but no punctuation should separate name and page number.

4.         Set margins at 1 inch on all four sides.

5.         Use a 12-point font.

6.         Double-space throughout, even for indented quotes.

7.         Indent the first line of every paragraph by five spaces.

II.        Quotation

Every quotation in a paper should be there only because it contributes something to the piece; NEVER use a quotation to avoid writing an original idea! Quotations have several purposes:

- as a focal point for a paper's discussion

- as a representative statement of an opinion or idea

- as an assertion of facts

- as a voice that adds authority or color to an assertion the writer has made.

Quotations may also be used to show a diversity of opinion, to clarify a point, to demonstrate the complexity of an issue, or to emphasize a point or make it memorable.

8 RULES FOR USING QUOTATIONS:

1. Make the direct quotation fit into the grammar of the sentence, and make sure the words are copied verbatim from the source.

2. Use ellipses (... ) to show where material is omitted from the original source.

3. Use square brackets [ I to add necessary information to a quotation or to change any words from the original source.

4. Use [sic] to indicate an error in the quoted material.

5. Any quotation that consists of 4 lines of prose or less, and 3 lines of poetry or less, goes in the text of the paper and is surrounded by quotation marks.  Line breaks in poetry are indicated by diagonal slash marks (/).  An example of line breaks is:  “Drink to me only with thine eyes/ For that’s the way to economize.”

6. Use block quotations for quotations that are longer than 4 lines of prose and 3 lines of poetry. (Block quotations are indented from the left margin 10 spaces and double spaced. No quotation marks are used with block quotations.)

7. Do not use "piggyback" quotes (one quotation immediately following another with no discussion or explanation between)! The writer of the paper should discuss the quoted material before, after, or in the middle of the quote.

8. Quotation marks are always DOUBLE marks (" "), except when there is a quote within a quote. In that case, an example might look something like this: "Robert walked up to the house and shouted 'Come out with the money now!' Immediately, an elderly couple emerged from the house crying, 'We don't have any."'

III.       Documentation

Whenever you borrow facts or opinions from another person's work--whether you quote their words directly or paraphrase (use your own words)--you must document (provide evidence for) that source, for several reasons: to give due credit, to avoid stealing intellectual property, and to help your readers gain access to that source if they desire to. Otherwise it's plagiarism, an offense so serious that if you're unsure what it is, you should consult the MLA Handbook, section 1.7. (Research tip: always write down full publication information of your source when you take notes from it; even better, photocopy the title page of the book or journal, and write the publication date if it's not there and, for a journal, the inclusive page numbers for the article. Otherwise, you may be missing information.)

There are two steps to documentation: specific reference to the page(s) used and general publication information about the source. The MLA style provides for page citation in the text rather than in footnotes or endnotes (those can still be used for explanatory notes). The in-text citations are keyed to an alphabetical "Works Cited" list that appears at the end of the essay and gives full publication information. The list includes only sources you actually cite in the essay (a "Works Consulted" list or "Bibliography" would include all works you used in your research, whether cited or not.)

IN-TEXT CITATION

The in-text citation form puts into parentheses the author's last name and the page number(s) of the information; this usually appears at the end of the sentence or passage you borrowed. If you already named the author in the sentence, only put the page number(s).

Example sentence: The influential argument in The Problem of American Realism is that "Twain's literary opinions have been tied to realism because they seem to be based on an ingrained hostility toward romantic literature" (Bell 42).

Note the punctuation (and remember that book and journal titles can be either underlined or italicized). If your sources include two authors with the same last name, include an initial (M. Bell 42), or if you use more than one work by the same author, include a shortened form of the title (Bell, Problem 42) to differentiate them.

WORKS CITED LIST

The entry in the Works Cited for the above example would be:

Bell, Michael Davitt.  The Problem of American Realism: Studies in the Cultural History

of a Literary Idea.  Chicago:  U of Chicago P, 1993.

The information includes: author, full title of source, city of publication, publisher, and date (usually found on back of title page). Notice also the spacing, punctuation, format (indented after first line, double-spaced), and shortened form of publisher's name (U = University, P = Press).

There are, of course, many kinds of sources besides single-author books, and each requires its own kind of Works Cited entry. Only a few major examples can be given here as models; consult the MLA Handbook for a comprehensive list. Note: the

examples that follow are single-spaced only to save space--they must be double-spaced in your papers. There are standard abbreviations for missing information, since sometimes books (especially older books) don't tell their publisher or publication place or date, or aren't paginated: "n.p." for the first two, "n.d." for "no date," and "n. pag." for "no pagination."

A. BOOKS:

More than one work by the author:

Bell, Michael Davitt. Hawthorne and the Historical Romance of New England. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1971.

---. The Problem of American Realism: Studies in the Cultural History of a Liteary Idea.  Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993.

(list alphabetically by title; use 3 hyphens for author's name after first mention)

Two or more authors:

Jakobson, Roman, and Linda R. Waugh. The Sound Shape of Language. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1979.

(last name first only for first author)

Anthology or other collection:

Lindsay Patterson, ed. Black Theater: A Twentieth-Century Collection of the Work of Its Best Playwrights.  New York: Dodd, 1971.

Work from an anthology or edited book:

Hansberry, Lorraine. A Raisin in the Sun. Black Theater: A Twentieth-Century Collection of the Work of Its Best Playwrights.  Ed. Lindsay Patterson. New York: Dodd, 1971. 221-76.

(first list the work you used, then the larger book it's from and its editor; include the page numbers for all of the cited work)

B. PERIODICALS:

(if no author given, alphabetize by title of article)

Scholarly journal (continuous pagination in volume):

Levin, Jon. "The Esthetics of Pragmatism." American Literary History 6 (1994): 658-83. (information includes article title in quotes, journal title, volume article is in, year of volume, and pages of article; "continuous pagination" means the page numbers don't start over at " 1 " in each new issue within the volume)

Scholarly journal (non-continuous pagination in volume):

Barthelme, Frederick. "Archeology." Kansas Quarterly 13.3 (1981): 77-80. (unlike example above, includes also the issue number -- volume 13, issue 3)

IV.       Common Grammar and Style Problems in Student Writing

Titles:  Different types of titles of works are handled in different stylistic ways. Use italics or underlining for titles of works published independently, including the names of books, plays, long poems published as books, pamphlets, periodicals (this includes newspapers, magazines, and journals), films, and radio and television programs. Example: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn or Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.  If italics are available, they are preferred over underlining.

Titles of works published originally within longer works should be placed inside "quotation marks." This includes the names of articles, essays, short stories, short poems, chapters of books, individual episodes of television and radio programs, and songs. Example: "Young Goodman Brown."

Verb Tense: Students often think they should refer to something they have read in the past tense, but the PRESENT TENSE should be used to discuss literature. Example: Don’t write, "Huck's travels began when he faked his suicide and ran away to the river." Instead, write: "Huck's travels begin when he fakes his suicide and runs away to the river."

Ellipses: Ellipses are commonly misused to show emphasis or to create a mental or verbal pause. However, they should be used ONLY to show omissions or gaps within a quoted passage. The exact form of an ellipses depends upon where it occurs in the quoted passage.

When an ellipses occurs inside a quoted sentence, it consists of THREE periods with a space before each and a space after the last. Example: "When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary to one people to dissolve the political bands which have commented them with another, . . . a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation."

When an ellipses occurs at the END of a quoted sentence, it consists of FOUR periods, with no space before the first or after the last. The fourth period is the period of the sentence. Example: "We hold these truths to be self-evident. . . ."

If a parenthetical reference follows the ellipses at the end of a sentence, use three periods with a space before each, and place the sentence period after the final parenthesis. Example: "He has refused his assent to laws the most wholesome and necessary . . . " (Jefferson 342).

Dashes and Hyphens: The specifics rules for dashes and hyphens can be complicated, but there is one simple rule that students should never need a handbook to remember: dashes must look different than hyphens. Generally, a hyphen is used to connect two usually separated words or to break a word into syllables to stay within proper page margins. In these cases, a hyphen is made by using a line one character long. Example: "self-evident." A dash is used to show a sharper break in the continuity of a sentence than a comma might provide. In this case, a dash is made by placing two hyphens together. Example: "This pain chilled her--a cold, steady kind of surface pain."

Colons (:) Semicolons (;): These two are often confused, but they have specific uses. COLONS are generally used in two cases. First, colons serve to introduce a list, an elaboration of what was just stated, or the formal expression of a rule or principle. Example: "Students frequently misuse two forms of punctuation: colons and semicolons." Second, colons should be used to introduce a quotation independent from the structure of the main sentence. Example: "In describing his emotions, Douglass turns to the language of religion: 'It was a glorious resurrection, from the tomb of slavery, to the heaven of freedom."'

SEMICOLONS are generally used in only two cases. First, they serve to link together two independent clauses without a conjunction. Example: "Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality." Second, semicolons are used between items in a series when the items contain commas. Example: "The leaders present were Roosevelt, the United States President; Churchill, the British Prime Minister; and Stalin, the head of the Soviet Union."

You:  Forms of the second-person pronoun should be used sparingly in your writing. Too often students use it as a substitute for a first-person or third-person pronoun, but it should be used only to refer to the specific reader of a text. (Example: Don't write, "You can tell that Huck reaches his limit when he refuses to describe the floating bodies." Instead, write either "Huck reaches his limit when he refuses to describe the floating bodies" or "I can tell that Huck reaches his limit when he refuses to describe the floating bodies.")

Sexist Language:  From habit, many writers tend to refer to non-gender specific people using gender-specific pronouns.  Example:  “A promise is only as good as the man who makes it.”  The best rules for avoiding such problems are:

            --use language that is as accurate as possible.  Example:  “A promise is only as good as the person who makes it.”

            --use plural forms.  Example:  “Promises are only as good as the people who make them.”

            --use pronoun options.  Example:  “A promises is only as good as the man or woman who makes it.”