Grammar
Students often tell me that they hate grammar, and I expect that most of
us hardly relish the idea of studying it. On the other hand, I know that from a
teacher’s point of view grammar mistakes usually indicate sloppiness. A student
who is careless with grammar is usually careless in other areas of his or her
writing. Turning in a paper with a large number of grammar mistakes in a writing
class is analogous to turning in a drawing with crooked lines in an architecture
class because you were too lazy to use a ruler. In a professional setting, people
expect you to communicate in Standard English. If you do not, they usually
decide that you are stupid, uneducated, or lazy, and will not consider your ideas
no matter how creative they are. Consequently, I will weigh grammar mistakes
against your grade for assignments in this class.
The following are some common mistakes and some items that I find
particularly unacceptable:
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The essay should be typed double-spaced on 8 1/2 x 11 white paper, with
one-inch margins on top and bottom and 1 or 1.25 inch margins on the
sides.
You should use a normal typeface (Times, Courier, Arial Helvetica) and it
should be dark enough to read without problems. Do not use other fonts
unless there are very clear and pressing reasons to do so.
Your name, my name, the course, and the date should be single spaced
and placed in the upper left-hand corner of the first page.
Your paper should have a carefully considered and useful title.
All pages after the first page should be numbered in the upper right-hand
corner.
The paper should be stapled at the upper left-hand corner.
Do not underline, italicize, nor put in quotes the title of your essay.
In papers for my course, you may use the first person unless I explicitly tell
you otherwise.
Be sure you properly italicize the title of books or movies and put quotation
marks around titles of essays or poems. Don’t confuse italics with
quotation marks.
Do not put an empty space (an additional line break) between paragraphs.
Use the present tense in talking about the content of literary texts or
analytic essays. (For example: “Frow states [not stated] that it was
Wordsworth himself who encouraged tourism in the Lake District.”)
If you use quotations be sure they are exact and integrated smoothly into
the text. Additionally, they should be properly punctuated.
Make sure your subject and object agree in number. A common mistake
is to use the plural “their” rather than “his or her.” (For example: “Each
student brought his or her own [not their own] book.”)
Do not use the phrase “today’s society.” It is redundant.
Where possible, be economical in your wording
Quotation Guidelines
In your writing, I expect you to use quotations from the essays and stories we read.
The quotations serve as expert testimony and as material for analysis, comparison,
and response.
1. Do not use quotations for more than a fourth of your paper.
2. You must cite your sources. If you get something from online, site the online
source. For how to site online sources, see the Modern Language Association’s
at http://www.mla.org/ Look under Style then FAQ.
3. Use quotations to support what you have to say about a text. Avoid retelling the
story: all quotations should be used as evidence in relation to the topic you are
discussing.
4. Choose a quotation if it says something distinctive, if it is difficult to paraphrase, if
it is especially important to your thesis, and/or if it is open to interpretation. Use a
paraphrase (putting a quotation in your own words) or summary (a condensed
version of the main points, in your own words) if the quotation doesn’t meet these
criteria.
5. Use the present tense when quoting from an essay, story, or poem. You may
remove words from a passage by using ellipsis (. . . ). Please note that in ellipsis
there is a space between each period. If you skip a whole sentence, use four
periods but if you only skip a section of a sentence, use three.
6. For quotations within a quotation, use single quotation marks. For example:
Farrington explains Descartes breakthrough: “Descartes doubted all things until
he could not doubt his own doubting. Thus his phrase ‘Cogito ergo sum’” (12).
7. Keep long quotations to a minimum. Quotations longer than four lines should be
set off from your main text by a one inch indentation (block format).
8. Work quotations smoothly into your own writing. They must make grammatical
and logical sense when joined to your prose. All quotations must be a part of a
larger sentence. Do not do this: Blake shatters stereotypes of the individual.
“Those who dare appropriate to themselves Universal Attributes/ Are the
Blaphemous Selfhoods & must be broken asunder (Jerusalem 90:32-33).
9. Document your sources in MLA format: give line numbers for poems and page
numbers for stories, novels, and essays in parentheses after the quotation
marks, but before the period (e.g. Davis says, “Los Angeles has become a
fortress” (75). You may include the author’s last name either in your sentence or
with the page number in parentheses. Please note that you do not use “p.” in
citing page numbers. Also note that the period for the end of the sentence
follows after the closed parenthesis.
Examples of acceptable quotation use and documentation:
a. “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” says Dickens (1).
b. For Dickens, the eighteenth century was “the best of time” and “the worst of times” (1).
c. The eighteenth century was “the best of time” and “the worst of times” (Dickens 1).
d. “Alph, the sacred river,” Coleridge writes, “ran/ Through caverns measureless to man/
Down to the sunless sea” (3-4).
e. At the beginning of “Kubla Khan” Coleridge sets up an opposition between the limits of
man-made and the limitelessness of nature:
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to the sunless sea. (1-5)
The caverns defy man’s desire to measure them while humans limit nature in the dome.