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Rules for Writing About
Literature
By Dr. Sara Miller,
Northern Virginia Community College
Title
Write a title for each of your
essays and your research paper. The title should reflect the content of
your ideas. Your title should not be the name of the work you
are writing about or the name of the assignment. You can do a great deal
to create interest as well as to reflect your ideas with the title of your
paper.
The title should be written in
conventional type. Capitalize only the first letters of important
words. No quotation marks or underlining is necessary, unless you do
include the title of the work you are discussing.
Example: Jackie's True Confessions
Example: Images of Light and Darkness in "Araby"
Titles
of Literary Works
In all of your writing, correctly
punctuate the titles of works you discuss. The rules for punctuation of
titles are as follows:
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Use quotation marks around
titles of poems, short stories, essays, or subdivisions of books.
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Underline or italicize titles of
book-length works (novels, long poems), plays, movies or works of art.
Referring
to the Works and Authors
In your first paragraph, always give
the complete title, correctly punctuated, and the author of the work to be
discussed. The first time you refer to a writer, give his or her full
name (spelled correctly!).
In subsequent references, use the
author's last name without any title. First names are
inappropriate, and saying "Mr. Updike" is artificially formal.
Just say Faulkner, O'Connor, Jackson, or whoever.
Example: In
"A & P," Updike sets his story in an ordinary supermarket north of Boston.
Verb Tense
Always use the present tense
when talking about something written. The work exists now, in the present,
regardless of when it was written, or when you read it.
Example: In
"First Confessions," Frank
O'Connor uses his own boyhood memories. He tells the story of Jackie, a
young boy who is frightened of making his confession because he will have to
reveal his plans for killing his grandmother.
(The words "uses" and
"tells" are in present tense.)
Blending
Quotations
When you offer quotations as
illustrations for your ideas, you must incorporate the quoted words into your
own writing so taht the quoted words and your own words read smoothly, as
grammatically correct sentences.
Example:
Faulkner creates a series of memorable -- and unpleasant -- characters in the Snopes
family of "Barn Burning." Abner is described as having
"pebble-colored eyes" and he walks with "wooden and clock-like
deliberation." The girls are "big, bovine," and they move
"in a flutter of cheap ribbons."
If necessary, blend a quote by
making adjustments to its wording. Subtract or add words in the quote, and
punctuate these changes with an ellipsis or brackets.
Ellipsis
If you leave out
part of a quote to make it blend into your sentence, you should use an ellipsis
mark, or three spaced periods (. . . . ). The first three are the ellipsis
marks and the fourth is a period to end the sentence.
Do not use ellipsis at the beginning
of a quotation, even if you do pick up in mid-sentence. See examples of
correct use of ellipsis throughout this section.
If the quotation is short and
clearly a portion of a whole idea, you do not have to use the ellipsis mark.
Example: In
the opening scene, "a green and yellow parrot" hangs in its cage by
the door.
(Note: no ellipsis is needed
here because the material is obviously an incomplete excerpt.)
Brackets
Place brackets [ ]
around words or letters you add inside a quote; do not use
parentheses ( ) for this purpose. See examples in this section.
Punctuating
Quotations
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Commas and periods
always
go inside quotation marks; semicolons and colons go outside.
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ALL quotations which are shorter
than four lines of your writing or typing should be written by
blending the quote into your own sentences, enclosed by quotation marks.
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If a short quote is POETRY, use
slash marks (/) to indicate line breaks for the reader, and retain the
capitalization and punctuation of the
original.
Example: The images of night
begin in the opening
lines: "For the moon never beams without bringing
me dreams/ Of the beautiful Annabel Lee."
If ANY quotation is longer than four
lines, you must set it off from your own writing in a block format. To do
this, you should indent ten spaces from the left margin, retain the usual right
margin, single space the quote, and not put quotation marks around the
material. Example: On the trip to Florida, the grandmother has
dressed with care. She wears
a navy blue straw sailor hat with a bunch of white
violets on the brim and a navy blue dress with a
small white dot in the print....
[and] she had
pinned a purple spray of cloth
violets [to her
dress]. In case of an
accident, anyone seeing
her dead on the highway would know at
once that
she was a lady.
(Note: Ellipsis marks are used
to indicate omitted words, and brackets are used to add words that clarify the
ideas or make the sentences flow smoothly.)
5. If
you present a longer quotation of POETRY, you must set it off from your own
writing in block format by indenting on the right ten spaces and using no
quotation marks, but you should retain the lines of the original (make it read
the same as it does on the original page):
Example: In
cummings' poem,
Buffalo Bill's
defunct
who used to
ride a watersmooth-silver
stallion
and break onetwothreefourfive pigeons justlikethat
(Note: Even in this format,
the quotation is blended in to be part of the sentence, and the poem is paced
just as it looks on the printed page of the textbook. See p. 883 in X. J. Kennedy's
text, Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama.)
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