© Colman Hogan, 2020
Assignment Format Guidelines
The assignment you submit is a presentation of your work. It must needs be presentable. Sloppy presentation is a sign that you haven’t taken the time to make your work presentable, or you don’t know and don’t care, or both. It will not win you respect, or marks.
Each of your written assignments will receive marks deducted for faulty formatting and grammar. Over the course of the semester the amount of marks deducted for repeated errors will go up.
All work must:
Follow the Assignment Format Guidelines
be typed or hand-printed (not hand written) in 12 point font
have at least 1” margins
be double-spaced
have your name, the assignment name, and your group number in the top right corner
Name:
Place your name and the assignment name on the top right corner of your title page, or page one if you have no title page (title pages are optional). For example:
Tod T. Friendly, LR1 [Literature Review]
I may have on my desk at any one time 150+ student papers. In order to keep track of your assignments, this is absolutely necessary.
Tense:
When writing about literature or criticism, use the present tense. The reason for this is that you are describing and analyzing the text (and events in the text); you are not narrating. Description and analysis takes place in the present, narration in the past. Note the assumption: the events in a fiction or the ideas in a theoretical work take place in the timeless always-present. Obviously, while using the present tense as your bias, you may have cause to use a form of the past tense for events clearly in the past. For example:
Involuntary repetition, claims Freud, is one of the triggers of the uncanny. He recounts an episode from his own experience when, visiting Italy some years prior, he found himself in a strange town, in a strange neighbourhood of that town. All of the women on the street, who Freud notes were ‘painted’, were looking at him solicitously, and feeling very uncomfortable Freud fled that quarter, without really noticing where he was going. Almost immediately, upon heaving a sigh of relief that he had escaped, he found himself, uncannily, once again in the same quarter. Freud goes on to say that …
Notice that the present tense (bolded) is the bias tense for reporting, and that the past tense (underlined) is used to recount events that take place at a time earlier than the time of the reporting. Note the shift from present to past in both sentences two and three.
Quotations:
Do not bold or italicize quotations. Those two formats are reserved for emphasis (or titles).
All quotations must be referenced with the page (and paragraph for unpaginated e-texts), or line number (poetry, many plays). See examples below, for the proper method of doing this.
Readers need to move from your own words to the words of a source without experiencing a jolt. Avoid dropping quotations into your text without warning. Instead, provide clear signal phrases, usually including the author’s or character’s last name, to prepare your readers for a quotation.
Faulty usage: This error is known as a free-standing quotation: the writer plunks a quotation in the form of a full sentence into his/her discourse without any signal whatsoever:
In 2000, the Legislature of Manitoba passed a law restricting drivers’ use of handheld phones. “The bill prohibits the use of a cell phone while driving unless it is equipped with an earpiece or can act like a speakerphone, leaving the driver’s hands free” (Kelly 1).
Proper usage:
In 2000, the Legislature of Manitoba passed a law restricting drivers’ use of handheld phones. According to journalist Tina Kelly, “the bill prohibits the use of a cell phone while driving unless it is equipped with an earpiece or can act like a speakerphone, leaving the driver’s hands free” (1).
Punctuation: the reference information – the (1) above – goes inside your punctuation; this is logical, as it is your sentence (it begins with your signal phrase, and ends with your punctuation).
If the original from which you quote ends with either an exclamation or a question mark, and it is crucial to the quoted meaning, include it inside the quotation:
Kelly goes on to ask the rather rhetorical question: “How long will it be before the Manitoba Legislature acts to protect the safety of the province’s citizens?” (3).
Varying your signal phrases:
To avoid monotony, vary both the language and placement of your signal phrases.
When your signal phrase includes a verb, chose one that is appropriate in the context. Is the source arguing a point, making an observation, reporting a fact, drawing a conclusion, refuting an argument, or stating a belief? By choosing an appropriate verb, you can make your source’s stance clear.
****note the place of the various punctuation marks in each of the following examples.
In the words of researchers Redelheimer and Tibshirani, “…” (3).
As Matts Sundin has noted, “…” (441).
Patti Pe, mother of a child killed by a driver distracted by a cell phone call, points out that, “…” (1).
“…,” writes Christine Haughney (C1).
“…,” claims wireless spokesperson Annette Jacobs (179).
Radio hosts Tome and Ray Magliozzi offer a persuasive counter argument: “…” (xiii).
Verbs in Signal Phrases:
acknowledges adds admits agrees argues asserts thinks
believes claims comments compares confirms contends writes
declares denies disputes emphasizes endorses grants
illustrates implies insists notes observes points out
reasons refutes rejects reports responds suggests
Block quotations:
Occasionally one feels the need to quote more than forty words at a time. Note: be selective – do you need all those words? Time is precious; reduce the quotation to its absolute essentials. When you quote more than 40 words you must follow the quotation with several sentences of analysis of its contents.
When you quote more than forty words you must:
1. indent the quote from the margin
2. single space the quote
3. remove the quote marks (“ ”)
4. place reference information outside your punctuation
The idea here is that you are cutting and pasting the quotation as a block into your discourse.
Example:
In 2000, the Legislature of Manitoba passed a law restricting drivers’ use of handheld phones. According to journalist Tina Kelly:
The bill prohibits the use of a cell phone while driving unless it is equipped with
an earpiece or can act like a speakerphone, leaving the driver’s hands free. Further, the law makes an exception for Global Position Devices (GPSs) if they are mounted on the dashboard or windshield. (1)
What this means is that using your phone to talk, text, check maps or choose a playlist while you’re behind the wheel all count as distracted driving. And it doesn’t matter that you are stopped at a red light – the behaviour is still prohibited.
The above block quotation is indented, single-spaced, without quotations marks, and the reference is outside the punctuation. And note that the block is followed by analysis/clarification/comment upon its meaning and/or significance.
Accuracy: No one wants to be misquoted; no one wants to be selectively quoted such that their ideas are misrepresented. You need to double check the accuracy of your quotations. Think how omitting a ‘not’ radically changes the meaning of any sentence quoted.
Additions / Subtractions: If you leave out words from a quotation, use ellipses (…) to represent the missing words:
According to Kelly, “the bill prohibits the use of a cell phone…unless it is equipped with an earpiece or can act like a speakerphone” (1).
If you add words to the quotation (small changes are acceptable) you must mark those changes with square brackets, [text inserted]:
The narrator makes it clear that “the child knew that she [Elaine] could save her” (9).
Note on quotations from e-texts:
You must be clear on the distinction between paginated and unpaginated texts.
An unpaginated text is usually a web document (an e-text) that has no page numbers. A paginated text is a text (or photocopy) from a book or journal, or an electronic photocopy (.pdf); it has the page numbers of the original document.
Paginated electronic texts: Some electronic texts – .pdfs for example – are already paginated, since they are really digitized photocopies of print texts. Treat these texts as print texts and cite the page numbers as they are printed in the text (not the .pdf page number).
Unpaginated e-texts: If you are using an unpaginated e-text (i.e., a web document) you will need to number the paragraphs. If there are chapters or sections, number those with Roman numerals and paragraphs with Arabic. For example:
Freud makes an interesting point when he notes that comedy and the uncanny share a certain commonality. With respect to Nestroy’s farce The Torn Man, he remarks that “what is bound to seem uncanny to him strikes us as irresistibly comic” (III, 17).
This reference is to the seventeenth paragraph of section three.
Titles:
1. Major Works. Major stand alone between their own covers, and do not appear inside another work. The titles of books, films, symphonies, plays, etc. (i.e., major works), must be either underlined or italicized. I think it better to underline your titles and reserve italicization (and bolding) for emphasis. Note I don’t follow this rule in this handout as it is not a formal essay.
2. Minor Works. These appear inside other works. Titles of individual articles, essays, short stories, poems, songs, etc. (i.e., works contained inside a larger work; a short story inside a collection of short stories, for example), must be inside “double quotation marks”. For example, Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Philosophy of Composition” can be found in the Penguin edition of his works entitled The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Writings.
Bibliography:
In general you must give bibliographic information for all quotations in your assignment. However, if you are using a ‘course source’, you need not submit a bibliography. This is an exception to the MLA and APA guidelines.
A course source is defined as the specific editions of the texts on the syllabus, the versions of the texts in the course reader or for which I supply a URL, or any text that is posted on the course D2L. The assumption here is I know the source.
If you are using any other source – for example, a critical work, or an edition other than a course source edition – you must give bibliographic information at the end of your assignment.
Format your bibliographic entries in the following order:
author, last name first;
title;
place of publication;
publisher;
date of publication.
Book:
Moretti, Franco. Signs Taken for Wonders: On the Sociology of Literary Forms. London: Verso, 2005.
Journal article:
Belsey, Catherine. “Making Space: Perspective Vision and the Lacanian real.” Textual Practice 16.1 (2002): 31-55.
Essay in a book:
Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Philosophy of Composition.” The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Writings. London: Penguin, 1992.
Short story in a book:
Joyce, James. “Clay”. Dubliners. London: Penguin, 1999.
1