The Ruskin Library and Research Centre Coursework
Style Sheet.
1. Presenting your work:
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Use one side of the page only.
Leave a left-hand margin of at least 1¼ inches; plus right-hand, top
and bottom margins of at least 1 inch.
If typing, please use double line spacing, and 12 point for your font size.
Footnotes and endnotes can be in 10 point. If writing by hand, write on
every other line.
Use a single form of font for the essay (e.g Times New Roman). Use
black throughout. Do not use Bold in your text, and use Italics very
sparingly, for emphasis (create emphasis verbally instead). Don’t use
exclamation marks!
Pages should be numbered at the top right hand corner, with your
surname (e.g. Smith 9). Ensure pages are safely fastened together.
To indicate the beginning of paragraphs, either indent 5 spaces (or use
the tab key), or make a line space between paragraphs (in this case, do
not indent).
The essay should be given its title. Use a separate page for this and also
include your name, and scheme of study.
2. Referencing:
What is a reference?
It is an acknowledgement of the source of either quotations written by another
person, or ideas from another person which you have used in your essay. It is
not the same as a bibliography, which has slightly different methods of
citation.
Why is referencing important?
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To demonstrate where you are getting the evidence for your statements,
thus showing the research and reading that you have done for your
essay;
To enable the reader to find the quotation or idea in the original source
To avoid accusations of plagiarism (passing off the work of another
author as your own), which is a very serious academic offence.
FAILURE TO ACKNOWLEDGE YOUR SOURCES (EVEN WHEN YOU
DON’T QUOTE THEM DIRECTLY) IS PLAGIARISM AND CARRIES
SEVERE PENALTIES (please refer to the section on plagiarism in your
course handbook).
Where should references be placed?
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Most references will be placed in either a footnote or an endnote (either
is fine). For subsequent referencing of the same text, please see the next
section.
Notes should be numbered consecutively throughout an essay; in
dissertations, notes are numbered consecutively through each chapter.
Use Arabic numerals (1, 2, 3) rather than Roman (ii, iii, iv).
The note number can be placed at the end of the sentence where it will
disrupt reading least, or immediately after the quotation. The note
number is placed after your sentence’s punctuation without any
intervening space. Sometimes, it is a good idea to group references into
a single note, rather than have a rash of note numbers in a paragraph;
in this case, place the note number at the end of the last piece of
information that you need to reference.
How do I handle subsequent references from the same text?
You can use one of two methods:
Either: Use a shortened form of the reference in your footnote or endnote.
To shorten, give the last name only of the author and a short form of the
(usually the first half of the title if it is a long one), plus page number(s). For
example, supposing you had already quoted once from Nathaniel Hawthorne,
The Scarlet Letter, in The Norton Anthology of American Literature, ed. Bu
Nina Baym et al., 5th edn (New York: Norton, 1998), Vol. 1, p. 1354, then the
next time you quote, it could be set out thus:
Inheriting her mother’s exclusion from society and unacknowledged by
her father, Pearl’s nature ‘lacked reference and adaptation to the world
into which she was born’.²
The foot/endnote would then read: 2. Hawthorne, Scarlet Letter, p.1354.
Or: In the case of a text that you need to cite very frequently in the essay
(most commonly your primary texts), you can add the following sentence to
the footnote containing the first reference:
All other references to this text will be given parenthetically.
You then simply give the page number in brackets after the quotation in your
own text, when you next quote from this text. This saves a lot of unnecessary
end/footnotes. For example:
Inheriting her mother’s exclusion from society and unacknowledged by
her father, Pearl’s nature ‘lacked reference and adaptation to the world
into which she was born’ (p. 1354).
The only tricky thing with this second method that you need to watch out for
is when you are writing about two texts simultaneously. It must be clear to
your reader which text you are quoting from.
Is information from all of my sources set out in identical ways?
Not entirely. You need to distinguish between the following (for the detail of
what to do, see the next four sections).
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Full-length works (i.e. works that have been published between their
own set of covers as a self-standing book). Titles of full length works are
in italics (if word-processing) or underlined (if writing by hand). The
commonest mistake made by students is to fail to distinguish this kind
of work from short works (see next). When quoting from a full-length
work that you have read reprinted in an anthology, then you treat the
work as it originally appeared, for example, Paradise Lost or
Huckleberry Finn.
Short poems, or short stories, essays and interviews – anything that
would not be published by itself. Titles of poems, short stories, essays
chapters of books, or articles in learned journals (anything which is
part of a larger work) are placed within single inverted commas, with
no italics/underlining. You need to distinguish between, for example,
The Whitsun Weddings (volume of poetry) and ‘The Whitsun
Weddings’ (a single poem in the volume).
Essays contained in edited volumes of essays by different authors.
Articles in academic journals
Material found on the Internet. Remember Internet material must be
treated like any other source and fully referenced.
Teaching materials: handouts from lectures and seminars should be
referenced when you draw on them. Quoting from other students’ work
must be similarly credited.
What information may need to be included and where do I find it?
(Please note that not all of the following will be present in each case).
You will find this information on the title page and in the publishing
information on the back of the title page.
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Author of the work you are citing (in the order it appears on the title
page, so first name followed by surname). If there are more than three
authors, use the first name and add: et al.
Title of the work you are citing. Capitalise all major words. If it is a
book with a subtitle, separate each part of the title with a colon: for
example, Richard Dutton, Licensing. Censorship and Authorship in
Early Modern England: Buggeswords.
Editor or translator
Number of edition
Place of publication (town or city, not country)
Publisher (ignore words like ‘publishers’, ‘ltd’ etc.)
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Date of publication
Volume number
Page numbers (p. = one page, pp. = pages)
Internet material is dealt with differently, please see below
Referencing full-length works:
The commonest form you will need is:
Author, Title (Place of publication: publisher, date of publication), page
numbers.
For example:
Michael Joseph Greaney, Conrad, Language and Narrative
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 101-2.
Or, for an edited text:
Anna Trapnel, The Cry of the Stone, ed. by Hilary Hinds (Tempe:
Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2000), p. 10
Referencing shorter works:
Essays in collected book volumes:
Author, ‘Title of Essay’, in Title of Book, ed. by Name of Editor(s) (Place
of publication: Publisher, Date of publication), page numbers.
Lynne Pearce, ‘Driving North/Driving South: Reflections on the
Spatial/Temporal Co-ordinates of “Home”’, in Devolving Identities:
Feminist Readings in Home and Belonging, ed. by Lynne Pearce
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), pp. 162-78
Articles in academic journals:
Author, ‘Title of Article’, Title of Journal, Volume number (year of
publication), page numbers (don’t use p. or pp.)
Jayne Steel, ‘Vampira: Representations of the Irish Female Terrorist’,
Irish Studies Review, 6 (1998), 273-84
Short poems/short stories and essays:
Author, ‘Title of Work’, Title of Book in which it is printed, Editor (if
relevant) (Place of publication: Publisher, Date of publication), page
numbers.
Edgar Allen Poe, ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’, in The Norton
Anthology of American Literature, ed. by Nina Baym et al. , 5th edn
(New York: Norton, 1998), Vol. 1, pp. 1508-22
John Keats, ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, in The Norton Anthology of Poetry,
ed. by Margaret Ferguson, Mary Jo Salter and Jon Stallworthy, 4th edn
(New York: Norton, 1996), pp. 845-7
Referencing from the Internet:
All material that you take from the Internet must be acknowledged and
referenced properly, using quotation marks, notes and citation in your
bibliography. Failure to do this constitutes plagiarism.
There are many different kinds of sites (websites, e-mail discussion lists and
newsgroups, online reference sources and electronic publications). In
referencing from the Internet, you need to make sure that your reader can find
the material quickly. As the Internet changes so much, you should also give
the date on which you accessed the material.
Here is an example of how you should reference a website, the commonest
form of Internet use:
Burka, Lauren P. ‘A Hypertext History of Multi-User Documents’, MUD
History, 1993. http://www.utopia.com/talent/lpb/muddes/essay (2
August 1996)
3. Bibliographies:
What is a bibliography?
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A systematic list of writings by a given author or on a given subject
A list of the texts (including books, Internet material, videos, films and
illustrations etc.) that have been used or consulted in the writing of a
scholarly work. It is usually listed as an appendix after the notes at the
end of the work
It should always be included
What information should be included in the bibliography?
The same as given for a reference, except:
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The entire bibliography should be arranged in alphabetical order of
surnames. For example: Sanders, Michael, ‘Poetic Agency: Metonymy
and Metaphor in Chartist Poetry, 1838-1852’, Victorian Poetry, 39
(2001), 111-36
Authors’ surnames should be placed first, before the first names or
initials. If there are two or more authors, only the first listed author’s
name is reversed in this way. For example: Cosslett, Tess, Alison
Easton and Penny Summerfield (eds), Women, Power and Resistance:
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An Introduction to Women’s Studies (Milton Keynes: Open University
Press, 1996)
No page numbers should appear in the bibliography, except in the case
of articles in journals, essays in collected edited volumes, and short
volumes appearing in a larger book
The information should not be shortened in any way. If you list two
pieces by different authors from the same collected volume, repeat all
of the information each time.
Do not number or bullet-point the items in the bibliography
What should not be included in the bibliography?
Omit books which you read but haven’t used at all in your essay or dissertation
(either through quotation or ideas). In a dissertation, however, there will be a
certain amount of contextual reading that you may wish to include even
though you make no direct reference to it in your work, because this will
demonstrate the substantial research done in the process of doing the
dissertation.
4. Quotations:
Important: Failure to acknowledge quotations (however short) is plagiarism
and carries severe penalties. Please refer to the section on plagiarism in the
MA course book.
Setting out quotations:
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Short and long quotations are handled differently!
Quotations should be given in the usual double line spacing as the rest
of the essay, and should normally be in the same size and style of font
as the rest of your text (do not underline, italicise or put into bold). This
includes indented quotations.
Quotations should not stand alone as a sentence in their own right;
they need to be incorporated into your text in some way (see below)
Great care should be exercised to get the quotation absolutely accurate.
Get into the habit of checking your quotations against the source text
(or against your notes that were checked at the time of writing) – the
chances are that you will make a mistake sometimes
The content of quotations should be copied exactly as written in your
source, even if its punctuation, spelling and other features of layout are
not the same as laid down in the style sheet
For example:
(i)
But I lose my time; follow me slave! I will see if she is in the
gallery. – For heaven’s sake my dear good lord, cried Jaquez, do
not go to the gallery! Satan himself I believe is in the great
chamber next to the gallery. 1
(ii)
‘I take it you do dance, Mr Bill Door?’
FAMED FOR IT, MISS FLITWORTH.2
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If your quotation already has quotation marks within it, these should be
doubled within your quotation marks, even though they were single in
the original text
Chris Baldick defines Spoonerism as ‘a phrase in which the initial
consonants of two words have been swapped over, creating an amusing
new expression’ and gives as an example Spooner’s ‘accusation that a
student had “hissed my mystery lectures”’.
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It is sometimes necessary or indeed useful to shorten a quotation, but
you must always indicate where you have done this by ellipsis … (one
space, three dots, followed by one space). Where the ellipsis in the
middle of your quotation includes the end of a sentence or the start of a
sentence, then four dots should be used instead of three
Short quotations:
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Short quotations are less than four lines of prose when typed or written
out, or no more than two lines of poetry
Short quotations are treated as part of your text; you run the quotation
into your sentence but enclose it in inverted commas
You then punctuate according to the sense of the entire resulting
sentence. Do not insert an intrusive comma before each quotation
unless the sense of the whole sentence requires it.
When the quotation consists of no more than two lines of verse, the
division between the lines should be marked by /.
Long quotations:
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Longer quotations are more than four lines of prose when typed or
written out, or more than two complete lines of poetry
Longer quotations are not enclosed in inverted commas
Instead, they are indented in your text as a separate paragraph. To
word-process this, use the instruction for a Hanging Indent
These longer, indented quotations should be introduced by a colon,
marking the end of your own text, and the quotation should end with a
full stop (or question mark/exclamation mark). Do not insert indented
quotations into the middle of your own sentence, and do not introduce
Horace Walpole, ‘The Castle of Otranto’ in Three Gothic Novels, ed. by Peter Fairclough
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), p. 68
2
Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man (London: Corgi, 1992), p. 209
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them with a sentence fragment which requires the quotation to finish
it. Lots of critics do this, but it is not good practice.
5. Non-discriminatory Language:
It is now standard practice in all official publications (government, business,
legal etc.) to use non-discriminatory language. You are expected to be aware of
this. Furthermore, the generic masculine (he meaning both women and men)
has fallen out of use in academic writing; so continued use may create
confusion in your readers’ minds. Using plural forms (for example, readers
instead of the reader is often a neat way of handling this (rather than the more
cumbersome s/he and her/his), while nicely indicating a sense of plurality and
difference. Avoid terms like ‘man’ and ‘mankind’ when you mean people,
humanity, human beings, humankind. Similarly, avoid outmoded terms.
6. Checking:
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Please check and proof-read your essay before you hand it in!