SCHOOL OF MODERN LANGUAGES
GUIDANCE ON ESSAY LAYOUT AND REFERENCING
FOOTNOTES
You must cite all sources you use for your essay in footnotes. This applies whether you have
used a direct quote or paraphrased an argument. Similarly, if you quote statistics, these must
also be referenced.
Footnotes are best placed where they do not interrupt the flow of the sentence, i.e. after
punctuation, preferably a full stop.
The following forms should be used in footnotes:
Reference to a book:
Mary Fulbrook, History of Germany, 1918-2000: the divided Nation, 2nd edn (Oxford:
Blackwell, 2002), pp. 25-27.
Reference to a chapter in a book:
Mark Allinson, ‘The failed experiment: East German communism’, in German History since
1800, ed. by Mary Fulbrook (London: Arnold, 1997), pp. 391-410 (p. 394).
Reference to an article in a journal:
Michael Hughes, ‘West Germans remember their war losses’, in German History, 18 (2000)
2, 193-213.
Reference to a film:
Good Bye Lenin, Dir. Wolfgang Becker (X-Filme Creative Pool, 2003)
Reference to a website:
Bernd Conrad, ‘Patriotismus als Fremdwort’, Die Welt online, 30 July 1996,
http://www.welt.de/daten/1996/07/30/0730fo104894.htx [accessed 19 Nov 1999]
(Note that the date on which you visit the website must be stated in brackets at the end of the
reference.)
Please note that the internet DOES NOT replace the library! Websites such as Wikepedia
may be useful starting points, but do not provide sufficient depth for academic essays.
The titles of books and journals should be italicised (whether in the body of your text, in
footnotes or in the bibliography), whereas the titles of chapters and articles should be in
‘quotation marks’. If you are not using the first edition of a book, this should be stated after
the title (see first example above).
If you refer to a book or chapter for a second time, you do not need to write out the details in
full, but can use a shortened form.1
1
E.g. Fulbrook, History of Germany, p. 36.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
At the end of your essay you must have a bibliography which lists all the sources you have
consulted, whether you have quoted them directly or not. You should use the same format as
for the references above, but place the surname of the author first and list your sources in
alphabetical order, as shown in the examples below. Page numbers should indicate the full
page range of a chapter in a book or an article in a journal, but are not required for a book.
Allinson, Mark, ‘The failed experiment: East German communism’, in German History
since 1800, ed. by Mary Fulbrook (London: Arnold, 1997), pp. 391-410
Fulbrook, Mary, History of Germany, 1918-2000: the divided Nation, 2nd edn (Oxford:
Blackwell, 2002)
Consult the MHRA guidelines for further details on references and bibliographies (you will
find a link on the SML website under ‘current students’.
QUOTATIONS
Quotations should be incorporated into the main body of the text if they are less than two
lines long. They must appear in single quotation marks (NOT italics), and should be
included in such a way that they do not interrupt the flow of the text or disrupt the syntax of
the sentence. You may alter the quotation to facilitate this, but remember that any alterations
must be shown in [square brackets]. If you omit part of the text, mark this with […].
Quotations longer than three lines should be set apart from the text in a separate paragraph
which is indented on the left had side. There is no need to use quotation marks for these
longer quotes.
If the essay is written in English and you are quoting from a primary source in the language
of your study, you should keep the quotation in the original language (i.e. do not translate
quotations into English).