PARAGRAPH AND ESSAY
WRITING – THINGS TO
AVOID

As we begin writing stronger paragraphs and
essays, there are three guidelines you must follow:
 Use
third-person pronouns, not first- or second-person
pronouns
 Write about stories in the present tense, not the past
tense
 Lead in to quotations correctly

First-person pronouns refer to yourself (or yourself
and a group of other people)
 I,

me, my, myself, we, us, ourselves, etc.
Second-person pronouns refer to someone else
(whom you are speaking to)
 You,
your, you all, etc.


Both of these are forbidden in your literary-analysis
writing.
In your paragraph and essays, you are never
allowed to talk about yourself, and you are never
allowed to talk to your reader (using the word
“you,” etc.).

When you write about events from a story, you
want to write about those events in the present
tense, not the past tense.
Past tense
He was
He walked
He flew
He opened
Present tense
He is
He walks
He flies
He opens
Correct all errors



Harrison Bergeron was arrested by the H-G men in April, but he was
able to escape. After escaping, he broke into the television studio
and danced with a ballerina.
Rainsford accidentally dropped his cigar, and when he reached for
it he fell off the yacht he was on. He had to swim to shore in order
to avoid drowning.
Mme. Loisel and her husband purchased a new necklace in order to
the other one. Mme. Loisel was nervous when she gave this
replacement one to Mme. Forestier, but Mme. Forestier didn’t open
the case and didn’t realize the other one was lost.

There are three rules you must follow when inserting
quotations into your essay:

Do not change anything about the passages you will include
in your essay.

All quotations must be placed inside quotation marks and
properly cited.

In your essay, a passage should never stand alone as a
sentence.

MLA guidelines for citations require you to place the
author’s last name and the page number of each quotation
in parentheses.


“He had never slept in a better bed, Rainsford decided” (Connell
26).
However, you can drop off the author’s last name if you are
only writing about one story and you have already given
the title and author’s name.

“He had never slept in a better bed, Rainsford decided” (26).

Any ending punctuation should be included after the parentheses.


Question marks and exclamation marks from a passage should remain
inside the quotation marks, and a period should still follow the parentheses.


“He looked about him, almost cheerfully” (16).
“But what kind of men, he wondered, in so forbidding a place?” (16).
If the passage you are quoting contains a quotation, the quotation inside
the passage should appear within single quotation marks.

“ ‘One of us is to furnish a repast for the hounds. The other will sleep in this very
excellent bed.’ ” (28).

“ ‘Rainsford!’ screamed the general. ‘How in God’s name did you get here?’ ”
(28).

Your passages must be part of a larger sentence.
Examples of what to do:


In The Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad explains that
the company manager “was obeyed, yet he inspired
neither love nor fear, nor even respect” (87).
In A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens wrote, “It was
the best of times, it was the worst of times” (5).



Examples of what not to do:
In The Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
writes about the company manager. The
company manager was not respected by
others. “He was obeyed, yet he inspired
neither love nor fear, nor even respect”
(87).
“It was the best of times, it was the worst
of times” (5). Charles Dickens wrote this
at the beginning of A Tale of Two Cities.
In both sentences, a
quotation is the
entire sentence.
This is not OK. A
quotation should
only be part of a
sentence.

How could we correct the following passages so that
they follow our rule?
 Nick
Carraway, the narrator, ends The Great Gatsby
with his final thoughts. These thoughts form the famous
last sentence of the novel. “So we beat on, boats
against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the
past” (147).
 In
Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut explores the
suffering of soldiers fighting during World War II. Even
though it is a very serious book, it is also written in an
almost comical tone. A good example of this is the first
line of the book. “All of this happened, more or less”
(3).