FILM AND TELEVISION STUDIES
GUIDELINES FOR WRITING ESSAYS
For Introduction to Film Studies 2009/10
Essay writing is a personal and creative activity but it is done within conventions of
scholarly practice. Getting a practical sense not just of the balance, but of the
relationship between these two aspects will be a large part of your progress.
1. The Purpose of Essays
Preparing and writing essays is one of the main ways in which students on the degrees
in the Department of Film and Television Studies develop their abilities. It is also
through essays, along with invigilated examinations, that the department tests
students. An essay is an opportunity to formulate ideas, to set out an argument and to
support it with evidence. The argument is yours but it is not just your opinion. Your
work should be original, not necessarily in the sense of presenting something never
previously thought of, but in taking responsibility for your own argument. Essays
sharpen analytic, rhetorical and writing skills that can then be applied to other tasks.
These ‘transferable skills’ are highly prized by potential employers who value good
communication.
2. Use of Background Material
In preparing your essay you will generally consult some historical, critical and
theoretical studies relevant to the topic. This background reading may in some cases
be less important than your close study of films and televisual works, but it is
essential to enable you to extend and focus your own responses. The department
encourages the development of individual analytical skills, backed by knowledge and
established sources. Essay writing will allow you to explore your own point of view,
supported by the evidence you have gathered.
With this in mind, make sure you note the details of secondary sources as you read
them (see (d) ‘Acknowledgement of sources’ below). Use the notes you have made,
but avoid confusing them with a formulation of your own view. The books and
articles you consult acknowledge their sources; this is normal academic practice and
you must follow it.
Note on Plagiarism
Plagiarism is the abuse of secondary reading in essays. It consists first of the direct
transcription, without acknowledgement, of passages, sentences or even phrases from
someone else’s writing, whether published or not. It also refers to the presentation as
your own of material from a printed or other source with only a few changes in
wording. There is a grey area where making use of secondary material comes close to
copying it, but the problem can usually be avoided by acknowledging that a certain
writer holds similar views. All quotations from secondary sources, including the
Internet, must therefore be acknowledged each time they occur. It is not enough to
include the work from which they are taken in the bibliography at the end of the
essay, and such inclusion will not be accepted as a defence should plagiarism be
alleged.
The university regards plagiarism as an extremely serious offence. A tutor who finds
plagiarism in an essay will report the matter to the Chair of the Department. The Chair
may, after hearing the case, impose a penalty of a zero mark for the essay in question.
This can have serious consequences for first-year results. In the case of second-year
and third-year students, the matter may go to a Senate disciplinary committee. If
plagiarism is detected in one essay, it is likely that other essays by the student
concerned will be examined for evidence of the same offence.
In practice, few students are deliberately dishonest and cases of plagiarism may arise
from bad scholarly practice. There is nothing wrong with using other people’s ideas.
In fact one good kind of undergraduate essay is an intelligent survey and synthesis of
existing views. The important thing is to know what is yours and what is not and to
communicate this clearly to the reader. However, plagiarism is cheating and our
academic staff have become extremely efficient at detecting it.
3. Scholarly Presentation
Observing certain principles of scholarly presentation for assessed essays is a basic
and transferable skill. It aids clarity of communication and enables you to provide a
full account of the argument you are putting forward.
(a) General presentation
 Students must submit their essays in word-processed form.
 A word count must be provided at the end of the essay, and recorded on the
front sheet. Footnoted references, along with bibliographies and
filmographies, should not be included in the word count, but all other text
(including quotations) must be.
 Use A4 size paper.
 Print on one side only of each sheet.
 Number all pages.
 Unless otherwise instructed, insert your student ID at the head of your essay,
on the right-hand side, and on the left-hand side the name of the tutor. Below
this should appear the title or question for discussion.
 Leave wide margins for tutors’ comments on either side of the page, with
space also at the top and bottom.
 Text must be double-spaced.
 Provide two copies of all essays and dissertations.
 All essays must include both a bibliography and a filmography.
(b) Presentation of titles (films, books etc) and foreign words
 Titles of films, books, long poems first published individually, television
programmes, plays, paintings and periodicals must be italicised.
Examples:
Citizen Kane; Film Art: An Introduction; Paradise Lost; Big Brother;
The Merchant of Venice; The Birth of Venus; Sight and Sound.
 The titles of articles published in periodicals, essays in edited collections, and
short poems in anthologies should be presented in single quotation marks.

Example:
Laura Mulvey argues in her essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative
Cinema’ that…
Words or brief phrases in foreign languages, unless they are part of a larger
quotation, should also be italicised.
Example:
A common feature of fin de siècle novels was…
(c) Quotations
 All quotations, from whatever source, should be exact in wording, spelling and
punctuation.
 Short quotations embedded in the main text should be enclosed in single
quotation marks and should be accommodated to the syntax of the sentence in
which they occur. Three dots (ellipsis) are used to indicate where words or
phrases have been cut from a quotation. Accommodation to syntax of sentence
is indicated by the use of square brackets ([ ]).
Example:
In Hollywood Genres, Thomas Schatz claims that ‘the gangster genre
has had a peculiar history ... [and that] its evolution was severely
disrupted by external social forces’.
 Quotations within quotations should be differentiated by putting double
quotation marks within single ones.
Example:
According to Schatz, ‘in the words of Johnny Rocco (Edward G.
Robinson) in Key Largo: “There are thousands of guys with guns -- but
there’s only one Rocco”’.
 Long prose quotations (i.e. those which take up more than three lines of text)
and quotations in verse should be indented by one tab stop from the left hand
margin, single spaced – though separated from the surrounding text by an
extra line space before and after – and presented without quotation marks.
Example:
In Jarman’s Edward II, as Edward embraces Gaveston, Annie Lennox
sings Cole Porter’s lyrics:
Every time we say good-bye
I die a little,
Every time we say good-bye
I wonder why a little.
The significance of this anachronistic choice of song is…
(d) Acknowledgement of sources
 Every time you insert a quotation, refer to information, or paraphrase an idea
drawn from another writer, you must provide a reference which clearly
indicates the original source.
 There are several referencing systems in operation. Below are guidelines on
using the ‘author-title’ system which is the set of conventions most widely
used by other departments in the Faculty of Arts and humanities disciplines
generally, and which we strongly recommend. For a more exhaustive account
of the rules of use for this system please consult the MHRA Style Guide




(London: Modern Humanities Research Association, 2002), available in the
library.
In the author-title system, references are presented as footnotes or endnotes. A
numeral in the main text will direct the reader to the equivalent footnote or
endnote containing the reference details. All modern word-processing
applications have the facility to insert and auto-format footnotes/endnotes.
(N.B. The numerals in the main text should ideally be placed at the end of a
sentence rather than in the middle of one – even if this means they do not
immediately follow the close of a quotation.)
On the first occasion that a particular source is referred to, the reference must
include full bibliographic details for the source along with the relevant page
number. The full references for published sources should always be presented
in the format shown below.
Examples:
1
Robert Sklar, Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of American
Movies (New York: Random House, 1975), p. 56.
2
Richard Maltby, ‘“Grief in the Limelight”: Al Capone, Howard
Hughes, the Hays Office, and the Politics of the Unstable Text’, in
James Combs (ed.), Movies and Politics (Westport: Greenwood Press,
1992), pp. 104-105.
3
Barbara Klinger, ‘Digressions at the Cinema: Reception and Mass
Culture’, Cinema Journal, 28:4 (Summer 1989), pp. 3, 5.
N.B. Observe that whilst the references for single-author monographs and
edited collections must indicate the place of publication and the name of the
publishers of the book concerned, references to periodicals do not. ‘28:4’ in
the reference to Cinema Journal means volume 28, issue 4; periodicals which
are published less than four times a year tend to count issues by number only.
Also note that if a single page is referenced, the abbreviation for the page
number is ‘p.’; a reference to more than one page is indicated by ‘pp.’.
If you make successive references to the same source, then the Latin
abbreviation ‘Ibid.’ (short for ibidem, which means ‘in the same place’) is
used in place of the author’s name and the title of the source etc. ‘Ibid.’ is all
that is needed if you are referring to the same page from this source in
successive references. If you are referring to a different page this must be
indicated.
Example:
1
Robert Sklar, Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of American
Movies (New York: Random House, 1975), p. 56.
2
Ibid.
3
Ibid., p. 58.
When further references to the same source do not immediately follow the
initial citation, ‘ibid.’ cannot be used. But all subsequent references are
shortened to the author’s surname and a succinct version of the source title.
Example:
3
Barbara Klinger, ‘Digressions at the Cinema: Reception and Mass
Culture’, Cinema Journal 28:4 (Summer 1989), pp. 3, 5.
4
David Bordwell, Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson, The Classical
Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960
(London: Routledge, 1985), p. 23.
5
Klinger, ‘Digressions at the Cinema’, p. 11.
6

Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson, Classical Hollywood Cinema, p.
23.
When you quote something from a source you have not directly consulted, but
which is cited in another secondary source, this must be clearly indicated in
your reference.
Example:
Laura Mulvey has written that ‘Hollywood films made with a female
audience in mind tell a story of contradiction, not of reconciliation’.7
7
Laura Mulvey, ‘Notes on Sirk and Melodrama’, Movie 25 (Winter
1977-78), p. 56; quoted in Richard Maltby, Hollywood Cinema (2nd
edn.; Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), p. 353.
Bibliography
All assessed essays must include a bibliography at the end which lists every written
source which you have directly consulted. Each entry must include the same amount
of publication information provided in the initial reference to the source in your
footnotes/endnotes. The only differences in the way this information should be
formatted in your bibliography are:
 Author surnames are listed first (the bibliography must be ordered
alphabetically by surnames). If the source consulted was authored
anonymously then ‘Anon.’ or ‘ANONYMOUS’ should be written in place of a
surname.
 Page numbers are not needed for listing monographs, but bibliographic entries
for essays in edited collections and articles in periodicals should indicate the
page range occupied by the essay/article.
 When an essay from an edited collection is listed, the book itself should be
listed separately under the surname of its editor(s) – see the Geraghty /
Brunsdon example below.
Example:
Bibliography:
Banton, Michael, The Idea of Race (London: Tavistock, 1977).
Brunsdon, Charlotte (ed.), Films for Women (London: British Film
Institute, 1986).
Fischer, Lucy (ed.), Imitation of Life: Douglas Sirk, Director (New
Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1991).
Geraghty, Christine, ‘Three women’s films’ in Brunsdon (ed.), Films
For Women, pp. 138-145.
Malbert, Roger, and Coates, John, Exotic Europeans (London: South
Bank Centre, 1991).
Newman, Kim, review of Sin City, in Sight and Sound 15:6 (June
2005), pp. 72-74.
Vincendeau, Ginette, ‘Gérard Depardieu: The Axiom of Contemporary
French Cinema’, Screen 34:4 (Winter 1993), pp. 343-361.
Internet citations
References must be given for all written material consulted and cited, including
internet sources. The conventions for quotations from books and journals (see above)
also apply to internet sources, and all such sources should be included in your
bibliography.
The agreed conventions for internet citations take the following basic form:
Author of page/s, name/title of page/s (in inverted commas), name of website
(italicised), date of posting (in parentheses; write ‘n.d.’ if this information cannot be
ascertained), page number (if indicated)*, URL, date accessed.
Example:
Ghosh, Arup Ratan, ‘Satyajit Ray’s Male Gaze’, Views, Reviews, Interviews,
(2000) <http://www.geocities.com/arghosh/malegaze.html>, accessed 18 May
2003.
Online journals often indicate an issue number, just like a published periodical, rather
than a specific posting date, and, in such cases, the way in which publication
information is presented at source should be duplicated.
Example:
Norton, Glen W., ‘Nostalgia for the Present: The Godard Renaissance
Continued’, Senses of Cinema 35 (April-June 2005)
<http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/05/35/godard_renaissance.html>,
accessed 12 June 2005.
*An increasing number of hard-copy journals are published simultaneously in an online format, and the
latter generally replicate the exact layout of the printed version to the extent that they indicate page
breaks and page numbers or duplicate the hard-copy in PDF form.
Citations of unpublished/non-written sources
Lectures
There may be occasions when you wish to make clear that certain statistics or ideas
which you are presenting in an essay have been taken from a course lecture. The
convention for indicating this in a footnote/endnote reference is demonstrated below.
Example:
9
Charlotte Brunsdon, lecture given at the University of Warwick, Coventry,
21 January 2007.
N.B. Such sources should not be indicated in your bibliography.
Films
 When a film is first mentioned within the text, details of director and/or
production company and/or country of origin and the year, should be included.
Example:
The Big Sleep (Howard Hawks, Warner Brothers, USA, 1944).
 On the first occasion that you refer to a particular character in a film, you
should indicate the identity of the actor playing him/her.
Example:
The main protagonist Philip Marlowe (Elliot Gould) is first seen…
 All essays must include a filmography, following the bibliography, which
should provide details of all films viewed in the preparation of the essay and
referred to in the text.
 A film entry in a filmography usually begins with the title (italicised), and
includes the director, the country of origin, and the year. You may include
other details that seem pertinent, such as the names of the principal performers

or the production company. It is recommended that you include the names of
the major characters in brackets after the names of the performers.
Example:
To Have and Have Not. Dir. Howard Hawks, Prod. Warner Brothers,
USA, 1944. Main cast: Humphrey Bogart (Harry Morgan), Lauren
Bacall (Slim), Walter Brennan (Eddie).
References to films in both notes and main text should include full title with
initial capitalisation according to the accepted style of the language concerned.
(For courses like National Cinemas I & II where foreign language films are
extensively studied, the module leader will explain how titles should be
capitalised in the relevant language.) Titles should always be italicised. In the
case of non-English language films, original release titles in the original
language should be followed by the US and/or British release title.
Example:
L’Amour violé/Rape of Love.
Television or radio programmes
 When television or radio programmes are discussed or alluded to in your
essay, they must also be listed in your filmography. Information for such
sources usually appears in the following order:
a)
b)
c)
d)
e)
Title of episode or segment, if appropriate (in quotation marks)
Title of programme (italicised)
Country of origin
Name of channel or network
Transmission date. This is abbreviated to ‘tx’, and can be found for all
programmes broadcast in the UK after 1995 in the online Television and
Radio Index for Learning and Teaching (TRILT) at:
http://www.trilt.ac.uk/index.php.
Example:
‘Sold’, episode one, Band of Gold, first series, UK, Granada, tx.
12.3.1995.
Writer: Kay Mellor, Dir: Richard Standeven, Prod: Tony Dennis
Main cast: Cathy Tyson (Carol), Geraldine James (Rose), Barbara
Dickson (Anita), Ruth Gemmell (Gina).

Within the main text, the first (and only the first) reference made to a
television programme should be dated from the year of first transmission and,
in the case of long-running serials, the duration of the run should be indicated.
Details of production company, channel, country, may be supplied where they
are relevant to the argument but otherwise are best left for inclusion in the
filmography.
Example:
Coronation Street (Granada, 1961 -) is notable for its emphasis on
strong, witty and independent-minded women.
Where writers or producers are credited their role should be indicated.
Example:
Where the Difference Begins (Writ. David Mercer, BBC, 1961) was
one of Mercer’s most important contributions to television drama.
DVDs
The conventions for referencing information or quotations taken from the audio
commentary on a LaserDisc or DVD take the following basic form:
Name of speaker, name and date of origin of film, media format, publisher of disc,
place and year of disc publication, ASIN code (usually listed on retail websites like
Amazon if not on the disc packaging).
Example:
4
Kenneth Bowser, audio commentary on Sullivan’s Travels (1941)
(DVD, Criterion Collection, USA, 2001) ASIN: B00005JH9C.
Marks deducted for poor scholarly presentation
Your mark and comment sheet will indicate if you have lost marks for poor scholarly
presentation. The conventions which markers use for this are included as Appendix 6
to this handbook.
(e) Problems with English
There is a close relationship between quality of thought and excellence of expression.
One of your goals should be to develop the clarity, vividness and elegance with which
you use language as you increase the breadth of your knowledge and the depth of
your understanding. A first aim must be to ensure correct usage in spelling,
punctuation and vocabulary. Distinguished work presents interesting observations and
arguments in a precise and pleasing style, but poor English will affect the level of
success you achieve on the degree and will be detrimental to most job prospects. If
your spelling is shaky, begin with the list of ‘commonly misspelt words’ at the end of
this section. In addition, special care should be taken with the spelling of titles,
characters and authors of works being discussed.
Do not rely on the ‘spell-check’ facility on your computer. These programs identify
non-existent spellings but will fail to respond to typographical errors if the mistake
results in an existing word – for example if you type ‘way’ for ‘was’. Students are
expected to proof-read essays to eliminate such errors.
Whether or not your spelling is weak, use a dictionary regularly. An etymological
dictionary and/or a thesaurus can sharpen your style. Certain words are misused with
particular frequency. Before using the following, please check their meaning and
their grammatical usage: ‘disinterested’, ‘due to’, ‘refute’, ‘imbue’, ‘infer’, ‘quote’
‘elide’. Check also that you understand the difference between it’s (a contraction of
‘it is’ which you should avoid using in an academic essay) and its to indicate
possession (as in ‘the production has its problems’); under the section ‘commonly
misspelt words’ you will find other pairs of words often confused with each other.
(i) Tutors will indicate where you have made errors of grammar, punctuation and
spelling. You are expected to find out why these are errors and not to repeat them.
If unsure, consult a grammar. Common faults in grammar include writing sentences
with no main verb in them (if you don’t understand what this means, consult a
grammar straight away), incorrect use of the colon and semi-colon and misuse of the
apostrophe.
(ii) Also bear in mind the fact that logically structured argumentation cannot be
properly achieved without dividing the different stages of your analysis into separate
paragraphs. If you end up writing long passages of text which continue without any
pause over several pages then you will fail to communicate your ideas effectively and
convincingly.
Further reading
Some of the information in this handbook is based on Joseph Gibaldi, MLA Handbook
for Writers of Research Papers (New York: Modern Language Association of
America, 1984), the MHRA Style Guide (London: Modern Humanities Research
Association, 2002), and R.M. Ritter, The Oxford Guide to Style (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2002). We strongly recommend that you consult these sources if you
have any further queries.
Vocabularies in film and television
Film and Television studies draw on many disciplines. Some of the language in your
required reading may initially be daunting. If you come across concepts you do not
understand, the following dictionaries are recommended:
Bottomore, Tom, Harris, Laurence, Kiernan, V.G., and Miliband, Ralph, A Dictionary of
Marxist Thought (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1983).
Bullock, Allan, Stallybrass, Oliver, and Trombley, Stephen, The Fontana Dictionary of
Modern Thought (2nd edn.; London: Fontana Press, 1988)
Hayward, Susan, Cinema Studies: The Key Concepts (2nd edn.; London: Routledge, 2000).
Kuhn, Annette with Radstone, Susannah, The Women’s Companion to International Film
(London: Virago, 1990).
Stam, Robert, Burgoyne, Robert, and Flitterman-Lewis, Sandy (eds), New Vocabularies in
Film Semiotics: Structuralism, Post-Structuralism and Beyond (London: Routledge, 1992).
Williams, Raymond, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (London: Fontana
Press, 1976).
The glossaries in the following books are also useful:
Bordwell, David, and Thompson, Kristin, Film Art: An Introduction (7th edn.; London:
McGraw Hill, 2003).
Kawin, Bruce F., How Movies Work (Berkeley, Oxford: University of California Press, 1992).
Maltby, Richard, Hollywood Cinema (2nd edn.; Oxford: Blackwell, 2003).
COMMONLY MISSPELT WORDS
accommodate
accumulate
*discreet
*discrete
pursue
portrayal
achieve
affective
(effective)
aggravate
allusion
(illusion)
*ante*antiapparent
appropriate
argument
aural (oral)
biased
blatant
*climactic
*climatic
committee
commitment
*complement
*compliment
conscious
council
counsel
criterion
(criteria pl.)
crucifixion
deceive
definite
degradation
*dependant
*dependent
desperate
detached
development
dilemma
divine
*dual
*duel
embarrass
emerge (immerse)
empirical
existence
extravagance
fulfilment
goddess
harass
heroes
hierarchy
humorous
hypocrisy
incite (insight)
imminent
independent
ideology
infinite
irrelevant
irresistible
led (lead)
lightning (lightening)
loneliness
lose (loose)
loth (loathe)
medium (media pl.)
metre (pentameter)
necessary
occasion
occurrence
parallel
perceive
personification
*practice
*practise
precede
proceed
*principal
*principle
privilege
professional
*prophecy
*prophesy
recurrence
reminiscent
repellent
repetition
repress
rhythm
stratum
(strata pl.)
suppress
separate
simile
subtly
subtlety
succumb
supersede
symbolic
tendency
transience
truly
*make sure you understand the difference between pairs of words marked by an
asterisk