Writing About Literature

1. First, be sure to not plagiarize. [You are not to use any outside sources for this paper, but if you did for another class, for example, you would need to be very careful to paraphrase (put in YOUR words) what the writer says. That doesn't mean to change every third or fourth word or some of the words. That means to create your own sentences with your own sentence structure, using the ideas of the writer.

Then, you must STILL document with an internal citation that tells the writer's last name and page number from which that idea came.] Every semester one or two students find essays online and copy parts of them into their Essay assignment. This is not a good plan in that the instructor also knows how to find essays on the internet and can usually find whatever the student finds, in which case the student gets a zero on the paper with no opportunity for make up. Often that's enough to push the student into an F for the course.

2. Use internal citations after each of your direct quotations (and you must have direct quotations to prove your general ideas about the stories). Use short quotations, very rarely a whole sentence from the text. Then cite as below:

Missie May says, "Who dat chunkin' money in mah do'way?" (Hurston 561).

3. Remember that the writer's name, not the speaker's name, goes in the citation and that you don't need a comma or P to indicate the page number. When you use MLA form, everybody knows what the number means.

4. Use the MLA style for your works cited list. Don't try to remember the style; look it up. Nobody memorizes the forms, but we all have access to them. Then follow the form EXACTLY; as suggested above, the numbers and their positions mean something special, so don't rearrange anything in the form. These stories and poems studied are considered "works in an anthology," if you have an MLA guide; here is the entry you'd use for "A Rose for Emily."

Works Cited

Faulkner, William. "A Rose for Emily." The Norton Anthology: American

Literature. Shorter Seventh Edition. Ed. Nina Baym. New York: Norton,

2008. 2218-2223. Print.

Notice that the story has quotation marks around it and that the book is Italicized. That's the way to do it. Also you double space, and you indent all lines after the first. The last two numbers are obviously the page numbers. Again, the form is not negotiable; do it this way. The great thing is that since you are using only stories from this one book, you can copy and paste everything except the title and author in the beginning and the page numbers at the end (Gorgon 23). Because of the limited formatting options in Canvas, I am not able to make the example above extend to the edge of the right margin, as it should be, so be sure to look at the sample paper linked in the module for correct spacing.

To manage the indention of the second and third lines, use the hanging indent; the easiest way to do that is to move your cursor up to the ruler above your page, and click and move the lower part of the margin marker (looks like an hourglass) to the right one half inch (half way to the one inch mark).

The link below explains and demonstrates MLA formatting, citations, works cited, and such. Please look at those topics as you write your paper.

http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/747/01 Links to an external site.

Finally, look at the sample paper linked in the current module to see how the paper should look: double spaced throughout, including the work cited, internal citations.