Observations concerning essays
1. Punctuation of titles.
Short stories are in “quotation marks.”
Novels are italicized.
2. When citing novels use author and page #
For example:
(Conrad 14) not (page 14), (p. 14), (pp. 14), (pg. 14) etc.
Subsequent citations need only the page number:
(14)
3. Citation placement
The tale opens with a gruesome explanation of how the
father kills, skins, and bruises the "rat like" (43) bodies of
the foxes.
BETTER:
The tale opens with a gruesome explanation of how the
father kills, skins, and bruises the "rat like" bodies of the
foxes (43).
Here we get the quote directly next to the noun it is
describing without interrupting the flow of the sentence.
4. Quotes and quotes within quotes.
When you are quoting a simple line of dialogue, it is still
just a single quote.
INCORRECT:
Replying to this request, the narrator confesses, ""The
truth is, cathedrals don't mean anything to me. Nothing.
Cathedrals. They're something to look at tat on late night
TV.""
That's just a single quote.
Even when the father insults her at the end of the story by
saying, "'She's only a girl'"(432), she resigns herself to the
fact that he might be right.
CORRECT:
Replying to this request, the narrator confesses, "The truth
is, cathedrals don't mean anything to me. Nothing.
Cathedrals. They're something to look at at on late night
TV" (12).
Even when the father insults her at the end of the story by
saying, "She's only a girl"(32), she resigns herself to the
fact that he might be right.
Here's where you actually have a quote within a quote:
June May, reflecting on her ability to communicate, says, "I
try to think of all the Cantonese words I can say to her,
stuff I learned from friends in Chinatown, but all I can
think of are swear words, terms for body functions, and
short phrases like 'tastes good, tastes like garbage, and she's
really ugly'"(209).
In Heart of Darkness, we realize that the bulk of the story
is within a frame narrative—that is to say, we have
characters speaking dialogue in a story spoken by Marlow
which is told by another narrator. Does that mean we have
to quote within a quote within a quote?
That’s madness! The Horror!
So just use normal quotations when embedding lines from
the story
Marlow may snicker when the Russian says that he talked
with Kurtz about "Everything! ... Of love too," (21) but the
Russian's mind has been "enlarged" by the humanist, nonmaterialistic, spiritual values Kurtz came to the Congo to
disseminate.
Along the way he finds himself back in "the sepulchral city
resenting the sight of people hurrying through the streets to
filch a little money from each other, to devour their
infamous cookery, to gulp their unwholesome beer, to
dream their insignificant and silly dreams" (33).
Use this rule even when quoting direct dialogue:
When asked to describe Kurtz, the brickmaker pauses
before saying, “He is a prodigy…He is an emissary of pity
and science and progress, and devil knows what else” (37).
If you do have a character speaking inside your quotation,
you would indicate this with single quotes inside the full
quotation marks. This will probably be a rare occurrence.