NEWCASTLE UNIVERSITY
SCHOOL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, LANGUAGE & LINGUISTICS
Style Guide 2009-10
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CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
USING AND ACKNOWLEDGING MATERIAL IN LITERATURE AND LINGUISTICS
‘LITERATURE STYLE’
‘LINGUISTICS STYLE’
PLAGIARISM
GUIDELINES FOR THE PRESENTATION OF SUBMITTED WORK
ESSAY PRESENTATION CHECKLIST
INTRODUCTION
§1. The most important aspect of your work is always the quality of your research,
understanding, and thinking, but clear presentation tends to go along with clear and
intelligent thinking, so in order to do justice to that quality, to get a mark that reflects it, to
avoid plagiarism (below), and to have the satisfaction of presenting your work
professionally, you need to present your work correctly.
§2. This Guide is for the use of all undergraduates in the School, and it sets out the
conventions that you must follow in presenting your written work. The main focus is on
referencing and bibliography, which are vital to the integrity of your writing. Full
references must be given to all works that you quote, paraphrase or allude to. The
conventions look complicated at first, but once you have used them yourself they should
come quite easily to you.
§3. Within the School, two styles are prescribed: one for work in literature based on
‘MHRA’ conventions and one for work in language/linguistics (the Harvard-style authordate system).2 Students working across both disciplines (e.g. Q300 students) need both.
This edition of the Style Guide incorporates material that appeared as Addenda on the
Blackboard Community COMMUN083 in 2008-9. There are also some changes in ordering and
presentation, for instance to give clearer guidance on the citing of primary sources in literary
essays, and illustrative extracts have been added. Otherwise, there are only minor differences from
the 2008-9 edition, and returning students who are already settled into the conventions need not
worry about being caught out by a large number of new rules.
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Final-year students already using MLA style for work in literature may continue with that, but it
is not represented in this Guide.
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These are explained below, but first, some conventions apply equally to all work in the
School.
USING AND ACKNOWLEDGING MATERIAL IN LITERATURE AND LINGUISTICS
QUOTING, PARAPHRASING AND ALLUDING
§4. There are two main ways of using other people’s material in your essay: quoting (or
citing) it directly and paraphrasing the argument or theory, i.e. summarizing or explaining
it in your own words. Most of the time, you will use a combination of both. As a third
option you may occasionally want simply to allude generally to a published work, for
instance as an example of a particular school of thought. In all cases you must always
acknowledge your sources by referencing them fully, and in the case of direct quotations
you will need to choose and format them carefully.
ACKNOWLEDGING SOURCES
Why acknowledge?
§5. Full and accurate acknowledgement of sources is essential in order to give the location
of the material, to preserve academic integrity and avoid plagiarism (see below), and to
situate your work in an ongoing scholarly debate.
How to acknowledge?
§6. All primary and secondary sources used should be fully acknowledged in two or three
ways. There are details on all this below, but essentially:
§7. If you quote directly (verbatim) from a source, you must:
a) enclose the quoted words in single quotation marks;
b) give a reference at the point where you quote;
c) include the source in your bibliography.
§8. If you paraphrase an idea from a source there are no quotation marks, but you must
still give a reference and include the source in your bibliography. This is necessary where
the idea is not your own and where it can be regarded as the intellectual property of its
author. It is not necessary in the case of ideas that are very widely accepted or of wellknown matters of fact (see the section on Plagiarism for examples).
HOW TO FORMAT QUOTATIONS
Short quotations
§9. Short extracts that you quote verbatim (word for word) from a source text must be
clearly placed within single quotation marks (= inverted commas), e.g.
This ambiguity is compounded by what Stokes calls ‘the mixed dissent and assent
elicited from the reader by the nickname [“the Good”]’.3
§10. If you omit material from the original source, mark this by using an ellipsis: […].
Myra Stokes, ‘Gawain the Good’, in Studies in Late Medieval and Early Renaissance Texts, ed. by
Anne Marie d’Arcy and Alan Fletcher (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2005), pp. 337-52 (p. 346).
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§11. A quotation within a quotation is placed within double quotation marks.
§12. When you quote two lines of verse, mark the line-break with a single upright stroke
(|). (If the quotation includes more than two lines of verse, set it out as verse: see below).
§13. You should integrate short quotations smoothly into your own prose, so that the
whole thing is grammatically coherent.
§14. In order to make the quotation intelligible you may also need to make small changes
or additions to the quoted material. If so you must put any changes in square brackets.
You might, for instance, need to replace ‘reject’ by ‘reject[s]’ or ‘he’ by ‘[Browning]’ or
[Gazdar]’. In the example above, “the Good” has been inserted for clarification.
Longer quotations (longer than 40 words of prose or two lines of poetry)
§15. These should be set off from the main body of the text by indenting and using closer
line spacing. An example of verse quotation from a literary article:
It is at the very moment […] that a horn-call sounds in the surrounding forest,
summoning the hunters home and announcing, as it turns out, the imminent end of
the dream and the poem:
And with that word ryght anon
They gan to strake forth; al was doon,
For that tyme, the hert-huntyng. (BD, ll. 1311-13).
The second volume of … 4
And an example of prose quotation from a linguistics book:
It is no surprise, then, that Sampson rejects intuition as a legitimate source of
linguistic data. Instead he argues that linguists must use empirical methods, by
which he means using corpora. Corpus linguistics, he suggests, should not be
seen as a specialist branch of linguistics:
To be a corpus linguist is simply to be an empirical linguist, making
appropriate use of the available tools and resources which are
enabling linguists at the turn of the century to discover more than
their predecessors were able to discover, when empirical techniques
were last in vogue (Sampson 2001: 6).
Here Sampson is making it quite clear that he sees corpus linguistics as
belonging to, or as simple continuation of, the tradition of empirical linguistics.
J. A. Burrow, ‘Politeness and Privacy: Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess’, in Studies, ed. by D’Arcy and
Fletcher, pp. 65-75 (p. 73).
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§16. You should not enclose long quotations in quotation marks.
§17. As in the case of shorter quotations, if you omit material from the original source,
you need to mark this clearly by using an ellipsis, i.e. […], and if you alter or add to the
quoted material you should signal this using square brackets, i.e. [ ].
§18. Never enclose a long quotation within a sentence of your main text, since it is difficult
for a reader to carry on the meaning of your sentence. It is normally best to introduce a
long quotation with a colon.
§19. You must reference the sources of both shorter and longer quotations: see below.
On secondary quoting see §48 (‘Literature style’) or §66 (‘Linguistics style’)
‘LITERATURE STYLE’
REFERENCING & BIBLIOGRAPHY, AND HOW THEY RELATE
§20. You need to reference the sources of details at the point where you include them,
mainly in the form of footnotes, though repeat references to primary texts go alongside
citations in the main body of your essay. The bibliography is a list at the end of the essay
gathering together all the sources that you reference. References and bibliography map
onto each other very closely, so you can produce one from the other, compiling the
bibliography and producing the references from it, or the other way round: inserting the
references as you go along and compiling the bibliography from them. Either way, you
should compile your references and bibliography as you go along: if you leave them to the
final stages you may lose track and miss items out (thus risking plagiarism).
Look at these examples, and notice the difference between the reference and the
bibliography entry in each case:
A novel or other book by a single author
Reference: Molly Lefebure, Samuel Taylor Coleridge: A Bondage of Opium (New York: Stein
and Day, 1974), pp. 96-97.
Bibliography: Lefebure, Molly, Samuel Taylor Coleridge: A Bondage of Opium (New York: Stein
and Day, 1974).
A short poem from an anthology
Reference: John Keats, ‘Ode to a Grecian Urn’, in An Anthology of Romantic Poetry, ed. by F.
S. Jelf (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), ll. 17-19.
Bibliography: Jelf, F. S., ed., An Anthology of Romantic Poetry (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002)
So there are three main differences, and these give us simple rules for turning
bibliography entries into references or vice versa:
a) author’s surname goes first in the bibliography entry but not in the reference;
b) the reference needs a page or line number (unless you are referring to an entire work);
c) references to short pieces (poems/stories) also need to include their author and titles,
but these details don’t go into the bibliography.
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Before we go through some detailed formats, here is an extract illustrating how the system
works. Have a good look and try to articulate what information is being given, and how.
Julian is a loner who says, ‘I love all waste | And solitary places’.4 In the ‘Preface’ to ‘Julian and
Maddalo’, he is described as ‘a complete infidel’ (p. 213), a view borne out by Maddalo’s teasing
comment that, ‘You were ever still | Among Christ’s flock a perilous infidel’ (ll. 115-16). Julian’s
outlook may be considered as part of a consistently sceptical quality in Shelley’s writing where
‘awful doubt, or faith so mild’ (‘Mont Blanc’, l. 77) is set in opposition to orthodox notions of
religious faith. Shelley seems more content to describe forces at work in the physical world as
‘Power’ (‘MB’, ll. 16, 96) and their origins as mysterious or ‘secret’ (ll. 4, 139). William Keach
sees this facet of ‘Mont Blanc’ as Shelley’s response to ‘Hume’s argument that the “ultimate
springs and principles” of phenomenal reality “are totally shut up from human curiosity and
enquiry”’.5 But Shelley’s poem moves beyond Hume, inviting the reader to open up this closed
world to imaginative possibility:
And what were thou, and earth, and stars, and sea,
If to the human mind’s imaginings
Silence and solitude were vacancy? (‘MB’ ll. 142-44)
Keach’s wider argument is that the poem’s irregular rhymes,
impose on his and our experience of both an order of language that accepts the arbitrary
andsubmits it to the deliberations of art. They are part of the evidence the poem offers that the
arbitrary connections of thought and language need not leave the ‘human mind’s imaginings’
in vacancy.6
‘Julian and Maddalo’, in Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Major Works, ed. by Zachary Leader and
Michael O’Neill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), ll. 14-15. All subsequent references to
Shelley’s writings are from this edition, and are given in parenthesis after quotations in the text.
5
William Keach, ‘Mont Blanc’, in Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. by Donald H. Reiman and Neil
Fraistat, 2nd edn (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002), pp. 674-75.
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Keach, p. 675.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
Keach, William, ‘Mont Blanc’, in Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. by Donald H. Reiman and Neil
Fraistat, 2nd edn (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002), pp. 669-75.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe, The Major Works, ed. by Zachary Leader and Michael O’Neill (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2003).
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(End of extract: now for more detail.)
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Layout & Content of Bibliography
§21. Your bibliography must be organised alphabetically by authors’ surnames.
It should be a single list, not divided into primary and secondary texts, and it should not
contain bullet points.
§22. It should not be a general list of ‘Works Consulted’, but must contain only the works
that you reference (unless your module leader informs you otherwise).
Information required
§23. For a book, for example, you need to give:
1. SURNAME of author (comma)
2. FIRST NAME(S) in full or initials (comma)
3. TITLE in italics, with first and main words capitalised (open brackets)
4. PLACE OF PUBLICATION (colon)
5. PUBLISHER (comma)
6. DATE (close brackets)
See below for examples of this and other types of publication.
Formatting the entries
§24. You need to be clear what sort of publication you are referencing in order to choose
the right information and format, as shown in the sample entries below. A basic
distinction is between primary texts (poems, novels, plays etc.) and secondary (e.g.
literary criticism, biographies).
PRIMARY SOURCES IN THE BIBLIOGRAPHY
§25. Note that:
i) You should always cite from a particular edition, usually edited by one or more scholar.
ii) You don’t specify individual short poems and short stories in the bibliography: the
entry there covers the collection the short piece comes from, while the title of the
individual short piece is given in the reference (footnote).
A novel
Auster, Paul, The Music of Chance (London: Faber and Faber, 2000)
An edited work (long poem, novel or play)
Kyd, Thomas, The Spanish Tragedy, ed. by David Bevington (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1996)
Chaucer, Geoffrey, The Canterbury Tales, ed. by A. C. Cawley (London: Everyman, 1975)
An edited anthology
Jelf, F. S., ed., An Anthology of Romantic Poetry (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002)
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SECONDARY SOURCES IN THE BIBLIOGRAPHY
A book by a single author
§26. Lefebure, Molly, Samuel Taylor Coleridge: A Bondage of Opium (New York: Stein and
Day, 1974)
Note that the Lefebure is a monograph (secondary, critical text), while Auster, The Music of
Chance is a novel (primary, literary text), but the format is the same.
A book by two or more authors
§27. Birkett, Jennifer, and James Kearns, A Guide to French Literature: From Early Modern to
Postmodern (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997)
Notice that the second author’s forename and surname are not reversed, since they are not
involved in the alphabetical order of the bibliography.
A book published in a second edition
§29. Feuer, Jane, The Hollywood Musical, 2nd edn (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1993)
A translated book
§30. Sartre, Jean-Paul, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology,
trans. by Hazel Barnes (London: Routledge, 1995)
A multi-authored anthology or a collection of essays
§31. Armstrong, Isobel, ed., New Feminist Discourses: Critical Essays on Theories and Texts
(London: Routledge, 1992)
An article or chapter in a multi-authored anthology or a collection of essays
§32. Jordan, Elaine, ‘The Dangers of Angela Carter’, in New Feminist Discourses: Critical
Essays on Theories and Texts, ed. by Isobel Armstrong (London: Routledge, 1992), pp.
119-31
Note that you need to specify the title of the article (‘The Dangers of Angela Carter’) then
of the book (New Feminist Discourses), preceded by ‘in’. You must specify page numbers to
show the location of the item in the book.
If you cite two or more articles from the same collection you can enter the collection in the
bibliography (e.g. Armstrong above), then enter the articles more briefly, e.g.
Jordan, Elaine, ‘The Dangers of Angela Carter’, in Armstrong, New Feminist
Discourses, pp. 119-31.
An article in a scholarly journal
§33. Britzolakis, Christina, ‘Angela Carter’s Fetishism’, Textual Practice, 9 (1995), 459-75
Cixous, Hélène, ‘Castration or Decapitation?’, trans. by Annette Kuhn, Signs: Journal
of Women in Culture and Society, 7 (1981), 41-55
The format here is similar to that for an article or chapter in a multi-authored volume: you
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need to specify the title of both article and journal (but this time without ‘in’ between), and
give page numbers to show the location of the item (but this time without ‘pp.’).
§34. You should use this same format for articles from journals that you access through
JSTOR or similar electronic archives. This is because they are not web material as such, but
simply scanned electronic copies from printed volumes.
Course materials
§35. NB. Quoting from, or paraphrasing, course materials may or may not be appropriate
on a particular module. If in doubt, please ask your module leader.
If you do use them, these are the recommended formats for entries in the bibliography in
literary essays.
a) Lecture (if you are using words or ideas used by the lecturer):
Pincombe, Mike, 'Hamlet, Revenge!' (lecture given on 1 October 2009).
b) Handout:
Pincombe, Mike, handout to 'Hamlet, Revenge!' (lecture given on 1
October 2009).
When referencing this item you would need to add a page number .
c) Powerpoint presentation posted on Blackboard:
Pincombe, Mike, powerpoint presentation for 'Hamlet, Revenge!' (lecture
given on 1 October 2009)
When referencing this item you would need to add a slide number.
A website
§36. Mandell, Laura and Alan Liu, ‘Selected Seventeenth-Century Events’, in Romantic
Chronology (U. of California, Santa Barbara, 1999)
<http://english.ucsb.edu:591/rchrono/> [accessed 22 June 2009]
§37. Remember that you need to be very discerning about the web materials you use. If in
doubt, ask the module leader concerned.
For web materials that you use, the general principle is to give the same information as for
a printed item of similar type — as far as possible. You should also state when you
accessed the webpage, since they frequently change. See §34 on scholarly articles accessed
through web archives.
A film
§38. The Grapes of Wrath, dir. by John Ford (20th Century Fox, 1940).
§39. I.e. cite the title, director, distributor and date.
REFERENCES
§40. References accompany your main text, giving the source for material at the point of
use. They (mainly) take the form of footnotes, so:
§41. At the first citation from a particular work:
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Insert a footnote, simply choosing ‘Footnote’ from the ‘Insert’ menu, which will
automatically produce a footnote reference number in the main text and below. Note that
the footnote reference number in the main text goes last, after the close of the quotation
marks and/or other punctuation,3 (i. e. like this, with the 3 after the comma).
REFERENCING PRIMARY SOURCES
§42. When you cite the primary source for the first time, insert a footnote and in it:
a) Give full publication details of the edition from which you are quoting. This is the same
as in your bibliography (see above), and you can paste it in from there, except:
b) Author’s surname does not go first, since this is not an alphabetical list.
c) If you are citing a short poem or short story you need to add this in the reference, e.g.
‘Ode to a Grecian Urn’, ‘The Cook’s Tale’.
d) Notice that long poems are italicised, e.g. Paradise Lost, The Canterbury Tales, while short
poems and short stories are in quotation marks, as above.
e) You must specify page numbers (or line numbers in the case of poetry or verse plays),
unless you are referring to a work as a whole.
The format for page numbers is: p. = page, pp. = pages (i.e. with a full stop and space
after p).
The format for line numbers is: l. = line, ll. = lines.
Some examples:
A novel
Paul Auster, The Music of Chance (London: Faber and Faber, 2000), p. 94.
A short poem from an edition or anthology
‘The Wife of Bath’s Tale’, in Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, ed. by A. C.
Cawley (London: Everyman, 1975), ll. 932-4.
John Keats, ‘Ode to a Grecian Urn’, in An Anthology of Romantic Poetry, ed. by F. S. Jelf
(Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), ll. 17-19.
NB You can create references for other types of source by using the formats shown above
under ‘Primary/Secondary Sources in the Bibliography’ and converting them by following
the simple rules stated of §20, i.e. putting author’s surname last; adding author and title of
short poem/story if necessary; and adding page and/or line numbers if necessary (as it
usually is).
§43. If you are going to cite the same primary source again, add: 'All subsequent page /
line references are from this edition and are given in parentheses, abbreviated as XXX,
after quotations in the text’.
I.e. subsequent references to primary works are given in the main body of your essay,
rather than in footnotes.
An example:
A short poem
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‘The Wife of Bath’s Tale’, in Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, ed. by A. C. Cawley
(London: Everyman, 1975), ll. 932-4. All subsequent line references are from this edition,
abbreviated as ‘WOBT’, and are given in parentheses after quotations in the text.
§44. Then in subsequent quotations, give a short in-text reference in brackets
immediately after the quoted passage.
The reference consists of the title and page and/or line numbers.
a) Unless the title is very short, you will need to abbreviate it. You may be aware of
accepted abbreviations for works you are writing about (e.g. PL for Paradise Lost, or Murder
or MO for Murder on the Orient Express), but if not, use a short title (like Music). Do not
abbreviate authors' names in the form of initials.
b) Give page numbers for prose in the format (Music, p. 57) or (Music, pp. 57-58).
c) Give line numbers for poetry in the format:
- for a long poem: (AM, l. 17) or (AM, ll. 17-21)
- for a short poem: (‘Ode’ l. 23) or (‘Ode’, ll. 23-25)
d) For classic plays in verse, give act, scene and line numbers, e.g. (King Lear, 4.2.11-14).
e) Some long poems in parts are formatted similarly, e.g. Paradise Lost has cantos and line
numbers, e.g. (PL, 2.189). (Older works of criticism use a mixture of Roman and Arabic
numerals for references like these, e.g. (IV.ii.11-14) and (II.189)).
REFERENCING SECONDARY SOURCES
§45. Whenever you quote, paraphrase or allude to a secondary source it must be
acknowledged in a footnote. Insert a footnote reference number (as explained above, §41).
Then in the footnote itself:
At the first reference to a particular source:
§46. Give the full bibliographical information. This is the same as in your bibliography (see
above), and you can paste it in from there, except:
a) Author’s surname does not go first, since this is not an alphabetical list.
b) You must specify the page number(s), unless you are referring to a book or article as a
whole, e.g.
5 Molly Lefebure, Samuel Taylor Coleridge: A Bondage of Opium (New York: Stein and
Day, 1974), pp. 96-97.
6 Christina Britzolakis, ‘Angela Carter’s Fetishism’, Textual Practice, 9 (1995), 459-75
(p. 467).
c) Notice that the Britzolakis example is an article (‘Angela Carter’s Fetishism’) in a journal
(Textual Practice), so you need to give the page span, i.e. the opening and closing pages
(459-75, in this case without ‘pp.’), followed by the actual page cited in brackets ((p. 467)).
This also applies to articles or chapters in books.
Subsequent references to the same secondary source also go in footnotes.
§47. In subsequent references to the same source, don’t repeat all this information; just use
a short version, e.g.
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7 Lefebure,
pp. 98-99.
p. 469.
If you are using more than one work by the same author, give a short version of the title
too, e.g.
9 Lefebure, Coleridge, pp. 98-99.
8 Britzolakis,
SECONDARY QUOTING
§48. This is the case of second-hand quotation: using a quotation that is cited in the source
you are reading.
I.e. You are reading author Y, who quotes author X’s observation that ‘blah, blah, blah’.
You want to you use the ‘blah, blah, blah’.
How to handle this?
1. Avoid it if at all possible: if you can access the original source, you should do so.
2. Ask yourself whether you really need this quotation.
3. If you do, then it’s safest to do this:
a. In your footnote: reference both the secondary source (Y) and the original one (X). Give
all the information that Y gives about X (in some cases this might be incomplete – but
that’s not your fault).
b. In your bibliography, only give the secondary source, i.e. the one you have actually
seen. To list the original source would imply that you had read it, which would be (albeit
unintentionally) dishonest.
An example:
Your text
The nautical meaning of the word ‘is contextually plausible but not supported by usage
elsewhere’.1
Footnote
1. Diana Whaley, The Poetry of Arnórr jarlaskáld (Brepols: Turnhout, 1998), p. 151, cited in
Judith Jesch, Ships and Men in the Late Viking Age (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2001), p. 174.
Bibliography
Jesch, Judith, Ships and Men in the Late Viking Age (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2001).
OTHER CONVENTIONS IN LITERARY WORK
Paragraphs
§49. Each paragraph should be indented (use the tab key).
Citing titles
§50. Titles of books, plays, long poems and periodicals must be in italics, e.g. Twelfth Night.
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Titles of short poems, short stories and articles must be enclosed in single quotation marks
and not italicised, e.g. Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’. What counts as a long or short
poem? As a rule of thumb, italics are used for items that are published separately.
‘LINGUISTICS STYLE’
REFERENCING & BIBLIOGRAPHY
§51. You need to reference the sources of details at the point where you include them, in
the form of in-text parenthetic references, i.e. references in brackets. The bibliography is a
list at the end of the essay gathering together all the sources that you reference and giving
full details about them. You should compile your references and bibliography as you go
along: if you leave them to the final stages you may lose track and miss items out (thus
risking plagiarism). Referencing in linguistics is very straightforward (compare it with
‘Literature style above!). Here is a sample extract illustrating how to reference, as well as
how to cite linguistic expressions (§70 below) and give examples (§71).
Peterson (1998:233) suggests that the phenomenon known as Right-Node-Raising
(RNR)―which has always defied coherent syntactic analysis―in fact consists in parenthetical
interpolation:
(6) Amanda is―and Joanna used to be―my best friend.
Since Peterson’s general claim is that parentheticals fall outside the ‘boundaries of syntax’, this
would explain the analytical problems posed by the assumption that RNR is a syntactic
construction. Note that the parenthetical here is not even a constituent. This applies to other
parentheticals cited by Peterson:
(7) a. It will stop raining, I expect, before Sunday.
b. The train arrived―on time for a change.
Haegemann (1988) contrasts the adjunct while-clauses in (8a-b):
(8) a. John(i) always works better while his(i) /*John(i)’s children are asleep.
b. John(i) studies mathematics, while his(i)/John(i)’s wife studies physics.
Referential terms like John cannot be bound by (and hence co-indexed with) a c-commanding NP in
an argument position. The while-clause in (8a) is clearly subordinate to (a constituent of) the first,
so it is predictable that his cannot be replaced by John’s. In (8b), by contrast, this is possible.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
§52. The bibliography at the end of the essay should include every work you have cited. It
should be in alphabetical order, by author’s surname, and should be a simple list without
bullet points. If more than one work by the same author is being used, list them in
chronological order.
The entries should take the following form:
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A book
§53. The information required, and correct format, are:
1. SURNAME of author (comma)
2. CAPITAL INITIAL OF FIRST NAME (full stop)
3. DATE (full stop)
4. TITLE in italics (full stop)
5. PUBLISHER (colon)
6. PLACE OF PUBLICATION (full stop)
In listing books, it is not necessary to mention any chapter or page in the bibliography
since you will have given that information in the in-text reference (see below). It is
acceptable to use the author’s first name rather than an initial but the choice (name vs.
initial) must be consistent throughout the bibliography. Note the initial capitals for all
content words in the title:
Chomsky, N. 1965. Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. MIT Press: Cambridge, Mass.
A multiply authored book
§54. Note that only the first author has names (or name and initial) reversed:
Chomsky, N. and M. Halle. 1968. The Sound Pattern of English. Harper & Row: New
York.
Gazdar, G., E. Klein, G. Pullum and I. Sag. 1985. Generalised Phrase Structure
Grammar. Blackwell: Oxford.
A second edition
§55. It is important to indicate if a text is a later edition as these are often considerably
revised. If an edition has been revised, it will say so clearly in the opening matter.
Trudgill, P. 1983. Sociolinguistics: An Introduction to Language and Society. 2nd ed.
Harmondsworth: Penguin.
A thesis
§56. The format is similar to that for a book:
Buchstaller, Isabelle. 2004. The Sociolinguistic Constraints on the Quotative System British English and US English Compared. PhD, University of Edinburgh.
An article in a journal
§57. Note especially that you need to give title of article and journal, and page numbers.
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
SURNAME of author (comma)
CAPITAL INITIAL OF FIRST NAME (full stop)
DATE (full stop)
TITLE OF ARTICLE in single inverted commas (full stop)
JOURNAL IN WHICH IT APPEARED in italics
JOURNAL VOLUME NUMBER (colon)
PAGE NUMBERS (full stop)
§58. Only the first word in the titles of articles need have an initial capital:
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Gazdar, G. 1981. ‘Unbounded dependencies and co-ordinate structure’. Linguistic
Inquiry 12: 155-184.
Sperber, D. and D. Wilson. 2002. ‘Pragmatics and mind-reading’. Mind and
Language 17: 3-23.
An article or chapter in an edited book
§59. This format is partly like that for a book, partly like that for an article in a journal.
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
SURNAME of author (comma)
FIRST NAME or CAPITAL INITIAL OF FIRST NAME (full stop)
DATE (full stop)
TITLE OF ARTICLE in single inverted commas followed by ‘in’
INITIAL + SURNAME OF EDITOR(S) OF BOOK + ‘(ed.)’ or ‘(eds)’
TITLE OF BOOK in italics (full stop)
PUBLISHER (colon)
PLACE OF PUBLICATION (full stop)
PAGE NUMBERS OF ARTICLE (full stop)
Kempson, R. 1986. ‘Ambiguity and the semantics pragmatics distinction’. In C. Travis
(ed.) Meaning and Interpretation. Blackwell: Oxford. 77-103.
A talk given at a conference
§60. The information and format required are:
Durham, Mercedes. 2006. ‘It’s altered a lot has York: Right dislocation over time’.
Paper presented at Northern Englishes Workshop, University of Lancaster, March
2006.
A website
§61. Remember that you need to be very cautious about the web materials you use. If in
doubt, ask the module leader concerned. (In some modules you should not use the web at
all.)
For web materials that you use, the general principle is to give the same information as for
a printed item of similar type (author/editor, title of article, date etc.) — as far as possible.
You should always add the url and the date when you accessed the webpage, since they
can change quite rapidly. E.g.:
‘Texts and Corpora’, The Linguist List. Ed. C. Adams. Eastern Michigan University
<http://www.linguistlist.org/sp/Texts.html> (accessed 22 June 2008)
Or : NECTE (Newcastle Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English). Newcastle University
<http://www.ncl.ac.uk/necte> (accessed 7 June 2009).
In-text references should match the entry in your bibliography, using author or editor’s
name and date if possible, or title if not (e.g. ‘Texts and Corpora’ or NECTE for the items
above). You should specify page or section numbers, if available, in the in-text reference,
but often they won’t be available.
Note that you only need to give the url for materials that are only available on the web.
You can often access articles or whole books through websites or electronic archives which
are also available in print form, but in those cases you treat them as printed items, using
the normal formats, and you don’t need to give the url. This is because they are not web
material as such, but simply scanned electronic copies from printed volumes.
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§62. Course materials
NB: Quoting from, or paraphrasing, course materials may or may not be appropriate on a
particular module. If in doubt, please ask your module leader.
If you do use them, these are the recommended formats for entries in the bibliography in
language/linguistics essays. Note that in producing in-text references you need to add
page number for items b) and d) or slide number for c), e.g. Burton-Roberts 2008:3.
Examples of bibliography entries:
a) Lectures (if you are using words or ideas used by the lecturer)
Burton-Roberts, N. 2009. 'The meaning of meaning' (lecture given on 1 October
2009).
b) Handouts
Burton-Roberts, N. 2009. Handout to 'The meaning of meaning' (lecture given on 1
October 2009)
c) Powerpoint presentations posted on Blackboard
Burton-Roberts, N. 2009. Powerpoint presentation for 'The meaning of meaning'
(lecture
given on 1 October 2009)
REFERENCING
§63. Academic writing in linguistics follows different conventions from those followed in
literature―more like those followed in scientific writing.
§64. In-text references should take the following form:
(1) Surname of author followed by
(2) Date of publication, followed by
(3) Colon, followed by
(4) Page number(s) (where necessary) or chapter.
On in-text references to websites, see §61.
§65. When you are referring to a publication as a whole, it is not necessary to specify pages
or chapters. The whole reference, i.e. (1-4) above, can be in brackets as in:
The competence-performance distinction (Chomsky 1965: 4) is fundamental in the
study of language…
or just the information in 2-4, as in:
Chomsky (1965: 4) draws a distinction between competence and performance.
SECONDARY QUOTING
§66. This is the case of second-hand quotation: using a quotation that is cited in the source
you are reading.
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I.e. You are reading author Y, who quotes author X’s observation that ‘blah, blah, blah’.
You want to you use the ‘blah, blah, blah’.
How to handle this?
1. Avoid it if at all possible: if you can access the original source, you should do so.
2. Ask yourself whether you really need this quotation.
3. If you do, then it’s safest to do this:
a. In your footnote: reference both the secondary and the original source.
b. In your bibliography, only give the secondary source, i.e. the one you have actually
seen. To list the original source would imply that you had read it, which would be (albeit
unintentionally) dishonest.
An example:
Your text
Whaley (1998: 151, cited in Jesch 2001: 174) notes that the nautical meaning ‘is contextually
plausible but not supported by usage elsewhere’.
Bibliography
Jesch, J. 2001. Ships and Men in the Late Viking Age. Boydell: Woodbridge.
OTHER CONVENTIONS IN LINGUISTICS
Overall formatting
§67. An essay should have an explicit title.
It should, if appropriate, have explicit sections, the first of which should be a brief
Introduction and the last an explicit Conclusion. It is a good idea to title your sections and
number them (e.g. 1. Introduction’, ‘5. Conclusion’).
Sub-sections should be numbered and formatted, e.g.
1. Introduction …
1. 1. Research Questions
1. 2. Methodology
§68. Paragraphs should be indented.
§69. The essay must have a Bibliography (see above).
Mention (citation) of linguistic expressions
§70. In a linguistics essay, it is particularly important to make a distinction between the
expressions you are USING in writing your essay and the words or expressions you are
writing about, (i.e. those you are citing, MENTIONING). When you are citing (mentioning)
an expression, the expression cited must be typographically distinctive. The usual way to
do this is by putting it in italics. Thus, when mentioning the prepositional phrase (PP)
round the bend, italicise it as exemplified here (in handwriting, underlining is equivalent to
italics). Bath is a four-letter word but Bath is a city in the southwest of England.
16
§71. If an example is particularly important, or if it is a full sentence, or if you are going to
refer to it again or compare it with other examples, you should give it a bracketed number,
add a space above and below, and inset it. For example, an alternative way of citing the
sentence These fritters need to be thrown away is as follows:
(1) These fritters need to be thrown away.
In that case, it does not need to be italicised. Thereafter it need only be referred to as ‘(1)’.
Diagrams and figures (including phrase –markers)
§72. These should receive the treatment just described: give them a number and inset
them, (optionally) adding a space above and below. See above on longer quotations.
GUIDELINES FOR THE PRESENTATION OF SUBMITTED WORK
§73. Word count
Stage 1
Please follow the word limits stated for individual.
Stage 2/3 work
Submitted Work for 20-credit module (if 100% of assessment): 4,000 words
Extended Study: 5,000 words
Dissertation (Stage 3 only): 10,000 words.
The word count includes quotations and footnotes, but excludes the bibliography and any
diagrams or tables.
You should aim for the word limit stated (and writing concisely is an important skill), but
work may be 10% longer or shorter than the stated limit. If submissions go more than 10%
over the limit markers will not read the excess, and at 10% or more below the limit they
risk being self-penalising, i.e. they may well have insufficient breadth or depth.
Dissertations are a special case: they should be a minimum of 9,500 words and a
maximum of 10,000 words long. The normal rule that quotations and footnotes are
included but bibliography is not applies to dissertations.
NB: Your submission must contain a statement of the number of words: you should both
type this on the front page of the submission, and write it on the Cover Sheet.
§74. Overall presentation
(a) Your work must be presented according to the conventions for referencing,
bibliography etc. in Literature or Linguistics as set out in this Style Guide. These are also
available on SELLL Undergraduate Blackboard Community (COMMUN083). It must
include a bibliography of all sources (printed or electronic) used.
17
(b) You should present and proof-read your work carefully. See the Essay Presentation
Checklist in this Guide.
(c) The Cover Sheet (see (k) below) is a useful guide to the qualities looked for in
Submitted Work. You should also see the Criteria of Assessment in the School Handbook
and follow any subject-specific advice given by the director of your module(s).
(d) All submissions should be word-processed on A4 paper, and printed, preferably on
both sides of the paper, with margins of at least 1" (4cm), or the default in Word. The text
should be 1. 5 or double spaced. The recommended type size is 12, and the font Times
New Roman or similar. Please use recycled paper!
(e) You should include page numbers in a single sequence.
(f) Your work must (be anonymous, identified by your student number but not your
name. (There may be exceptions for Stage 1 work.)
(g) Your work should have a title page on which is typed:
i) the title of the essay;
ii) the name and number of the module for which it is being submitted. (In the case of
Extended Studies you need to give the module number of the Extended Study and of the
module to which it is attached.)
iii) your student number.
iv) The statement: ‘I confirm that this piece of work contains no plagiarised material and
that I have read and understood the section on Plagiarism in the School Style Guide.’
v) In order to preserve anonymity, you should not of course sign this statement or type
your name on the title page.
(h) Please staple your pages together before submission, but please do not submit essays
in a folder. Dissertations may be bound, for instance using an inexpensive spiral binding.
(j) Please submit one copy. You must also keep a copy of your own work.
(k) Each piece of work should have a School Cover Sheet attached, and you need to fill in a
summary sheet detailing all the modules for which you are submitting work.
§75. Submission date
(a) For Stage 1 work, arrangements are module-specific and will be announced.
Dates for end-of-semester submissions for Stage 2/3 modules are shown in the Calendar
at the beginning of the School Handbook. Submissions should be handed in between
10.00am - 12 noon or 2.00pm - 4.00pm in the main foyer of the ground floor of the Percy
Building. For administrative reasons we cannot accept submissions early.
(b) Note that the University has severe penalties for submitting late (even by a few
minutes): see Handbook 12.8. Candidates with extenuating circumstances should
complete a PCAP form (available from the Student Resource Centre) and hand it in to the
School Office.
§76. Marking and feedback
(a) Stage 1 work is first marked by module leaders or seminar tutors and moderated by a
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second member of staff.
Stage 2/3 work is normally marked by the module leader and another member of staff
with related expertise. External examiners — experts in the relevant subjects from other
universities — oversee the whole examining process and sample work to check overall
fairness of assessment and marking.
(b) Marking is according to the Criteria of Assessment, published in the School Handbook.
(c) A copy of your marked work will be made and kept for a year in the School archive,
and the original will be returned to you, annotated with comments from the first marker,
in addition to the comments on the Cover Sheet, once available (approximately four weeks
after the end of the assessment period), and in the next semester there will be an
opportunity to raise any queries with the module leader.
§77. Stage 1 formative (non-assessed) essays
Arrangements for these are somewhat different and will be announced in the context of
individual modules.
PLAGIARISM
§78. This is the use of any source, published or unpublished, without full and specific
acknowledgement. It is a form of cheating which can be quite easily detectable and can
result in failure of modules or in disciplinary action. Please carefully read the following:

‘Any source’: this may be printed, electronic, or another student's work (whether at this
university or another).

Purchasing an essay from someone else is a form of plagiarism.

Submitting the same work for different modules is self-plagiarism.

Plagiarism is not necessarily deliberate: it can result from incomplete note-taking, or
haste in the final stages of an essay or project.

It can occur in an examination script as well as in submitted work.

Proper acknowledgement: merely listing a source in a bibliography is not enough —
see the sections on referencing in this Guide.

You must acknowledge fully if you quote verbatim from a source, but also if you
paraphrase a source or use its distinctive ideas.
• You do not need to provide references for ideas that are widely accepted as matters of
fact, or for any information of a general nature. For example, you don’t have to indicate a
source when you mention that Shakespeare died in 1616, that Saussure was a Swiss
linguist, or that /b/ is a voiced bilabial plosive.
Avoiding Plagiarism
§79. At the writing-up stage, follow the guidelines above, but you can help yourself at the
earlier stages too:
19

In taking notes, make sure you very clearly distinguish between your source material
and your own material. One suggestion would be to use different colour pens to
differentiate between your ideas and those taken from another source.

Make sure that any notes, photocopies, or electronic files that you keep are fully
documented with the name of the author and the source from which they were taken,
so that you have this information readily available for your write-up. Never import
material from an electronic source into your drafts with the intention of modifying it,
or attempt to make an essay out of a patchwork of material from electronic or printed
sources that you have lightly modified. Even if you acknowledge the sources it will be
a very poor essay, and if you do not, it will constitute plagiarism.

Insert your references and compile your bibliography as you draft your essay (see Style
Guide §20 (literature) or §51 (linguistics)).

Some plagiarism comes about because of last-minute panic, so organise your time well.
Don’t be tempted to plagiarism because of difficult circumstances: there are ways of
dealing with those (see 12.12).
ESSAY PRESENTATION CHECKLIST
Word limits
Stage 1 assignments – various lengths
Stage 2 & 3 submitted work – 4,000 words
Stage 2 & 3 extended study – 5,000 words
Stage 3 Dissertation – 10,000 words
These limits assume that the assignment is the whole assessment for a module. See also §73 above
on word limits.
Candidates must not draw substantially on the same material in more than one answer or
reproduce work already submitted for assessment.
Since the criteria for awarding marks explicitly include the following, you should check that you
have in fact taken them into account.
1.
2.
3.
Accurate English: grammar, syntax, no sentence fragments,
correct punctuation and use of vocabulary.
Appropriate style (e.g. don’t use contractions such as don’t).
Layout: Margins, double or 1.5-spaced lines, pages numbered and bearing
your student number (but not your name);
paragraphs clearly indicated by indentation or line-space.
Spelling and proof-reading: Spellcheck used if available; essay
read through for things the Spellcheck won’t spot; correct use of
apostrophe to mark possessives and omission of letters
20
 Tick
 Tick
4.
5.
6.
(e.g. society’s and societies). Note its, not it’s = of it.
 Tick
Quotations: Short quotations and longer quotations handled
correctly as in the School Style Guide
 Tick
Titles, referencing and notes: Titles, references and notes (if any)
as School Style Guide. All quotation and paraphrase referenced.
 Tick
Bibliography: Complete; in alphabetical order of author; all required
information in the right order and punctuated correctly.
 Tick
SELLL/DW/Sept09
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