English reading practice

READING ENGLISH AND WRITING ESSAYS: A STUDENT’S GUIDE Revised edition, September 2012 This booklet is intended to provide both generalized guidance for the study of English Literature a

READING ENGLISH AND WRITING ESSAYS:

A STUDENT’S GUIDE

Revised edition, September 2012

This booklet is intended to provide both generalized guidance for the study of English Literature

at university and specific pointers on aspects of essay writing and presentation For further help with your studies, you are encouraged to visit the Arts Faculty webpage

www.bris.ac.uk/arts/skills, where you will find advice on, for example, note-taking and

referencing, grammar skills, and online research See also the University webpage

www.bris.ac.uk/studentskills, which leads you to a searchable directory of free courses and

resources covering issues such as time management, academic writing, critical thinking,

presentation skills, the use of computing and library facilities, and so forth Do make the most of what the University has to offer in terms of help and support

It is expected that this booklet will be revised periodically; comments, queries and suggestions for additions or improvements are most welcome Please email these to stephen.james@bristol ac.uk

Dr Stephen James

Senior Lecturer

Department of English

CONTENTS

Independent Study: A Checklist of Weekly Activities 4

THE STYLE GUIDE:

READING ENGLISH AT UNIVERSITY

When studying an Arts-based subject at university, your time is largely your own This can be both liberating and highly challenging; for many, it is the single hardest adjustment from school-

level work Full-time English students at Bristol are firmly expected to invest forty hours a

week in their studies For single-honours students, approximately six of these hours are covered

by formal teaching (lectures, tutorials, seminars), while joint-honours students will typically have between two and four teaching hours in English and further hours in their other subject That leaves about thirty-four hours for single honours students and between sixteen and eighteen (on the English side) for joint-honours students to spend each week on independent study

It is down to you to draw up your own schedule of work It is worth experimenting with a

weekly timetable, although how you will map out the hours for different tasks is likely to vary greatly from week to week, especially with regard to the shifting ratios of reading time and

writing time The main thing is to set aside the allotted hours and try to keep to a routine Aim for a work pattern of eight hours a day, five days a week (inclusive of teaching hours), or the equivalent spread over a week (though many find it beneficial to keep one day a week completely free from academic work) The pattern may be very flexible; you might aim to work two out of three sections of a day: morning and afternoon but not evening, morning and evening but not afternoon, and so forth Take the time to work out what schedule best suits you Trial and error might also be involved in establishing the best location for your studies; halls of residence tend

to have quieter and noisier hours, and the library has its busy and less busy times Many find that varying locations through the day, or from day to day, is conducive to happy studying

The other major adjustment university students of English have to make is to the requirement that they read, and move between, a wide range of literary and critical works relatively quickly; where, perhaps, students may have studied a single play of Shakespeare over a period of months, they will now be expected to study a play (or sometimes two) in a week – hence, of course, the need for so much independent study time New students should be reassured that the adjustment

is not as tough as it might at first seem Don’t be dismayed if you find that your speed of reading and assimilation feels very slow at first It will certainly improve, and probably quite dramatically, with experience Mature students, in particular, can worry about feeling out of practice, but a few weeks should make all the difference If you do find in general that your workload feels

unreasonably heavy, or that you are having real difficulties managing your time, talk to your unit and/or personal tutor

INDEPENDENT STUDY: A CHECKLIST OF WEEKLY ACTIVITIES

A combination of any or all of the activities in the list below will easily fill the thirty four hours

or so that full-time students are expected to devote to private study each week Where the

requirements in one area are relatively light in a given week (for instance, in a lull between essay deadlines, or when the set text for a seminar or tutorial is one you have already read and

prepared notes on), this is the week for moving ahead with other aspects of your studies, and for planning ahead to avoid undue pressures in due course These, then, are the tasks you are

expected to juggle and, as necessary, prioritize:

 Preparing for forthcoming seminars and tutorials; this will typically involve:

(A) reading core texts and other required material (essays, handouts, etc);

(B) taking notes and identifying key passages;

(C) preparing talking points and questions for class discussion

 Preparing a seminar presentation (when required)

 Reading and planning in preparation for forthcoming essays

 Producing a first draft of an essay well in advance of the deadline

 Repeatedly revising and improving the essay before handing it in (probably two full days’ work after the completion of the draft)

 Conferring with tutors about forthcoming or recently marked essays (as required)

 Taking stock of a tutor’s comments on an essay: re-thinking ideas and phrases, re-writing sentences or passages to one’s own satisfaction, jotting notes to self about things to

improve upon, and so forth; this may take a few hours per essay at first but the benefits to one’s writing and confidence should be significant

 Reading (and re-reading, as often as necessary, relevant sections of) the Style Guide

contained within this booklet and Diané Collinson et al, eds, Plain English, 2nd edn

(Buckingham: Open University Press, 2001) Do not consider this reading as a brief, off exercise: you need to invest as much time as is required to reach the point where you are confident that your prose is free from the various errors and impediments described in these works

one- Reading a range of supplementary material from course bibliographies

 Reading in preparation for or in the light of lectures

 Reading literature beyond the requirements of the teaching programme

KEY MATERIALS FOR REGULAR REFERENCE

It would be a good idea to work with the following to hand, any or all of which you can expect

to be consulting on a regular (and in some cases daily) basis:

 This booklet (in particular, for its Style Guide pages)

 The English department’s Undergraduate Handbook (and the Faculty of Arts Undergraduate Handbook)

 A good dictionary (e.g the Concise Oxford or The Chambers Dictionary); you can also make use of the OED online from any university-networked PC: follow the links from the

‘Further Resources’ page of bristol.ac.uk/english/current-undergraduates/

 A thesaurus (e.g Roget’s Thesaurus)

 Stephen Greenblatt et al, eds, The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 8th edn, 2 vols (New York: Norton, 2006)

 Diané Collinson et al, eds, Plain English, 2nd edn (Buckingham: Open University Press, 2001)

 J A Cuddon, The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, 4th edn, ed

(London: Penguin, 2004), or a similar glossary of literary and critical terms

 Dinah Birch, ed., The Oxford Companion to English Literature, 7th edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), or Margaret Drabble, Jenny Stringer and Daniel Hahn, eds, The Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature, 3rd, rev edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007)

TAKING NOTES IN SEMINARS AND TUTORIALS

Most note-taking should take place before, not during, a taught session: jot down your ideas and

insights about the text or topic in question, and any points which you may wish to raise, and go over these jottings just prior to each class It is not a good idea to take extensive notes during a tutorial or seminar (though you should always have pen and paper handy for catching occasional ideas or references) The purpose of these sessions is to generate a process of learning through debate and discussion and if you are too busy writing things down you won’t be able either to participate verbally or – equally important – to remain intellectually responsive through attentive listening

TAKING NOTES IN LECTURES

Again, too much transcription will diminish the listening, and thus the learning, experience Many students find that jotting down a summary of main points, plus some references and key words (and things to look up) is about right An outline is more efficient than continuous prose:

it shows relationships between points more clearly and is more helpful to go back to later

Between half a side and one side of a sheet of A4 is often the norm You could always try

formulating on paper the gist of a lecture in a few sentences, or your own elaboration of one particular idea that arose in the lecture and especially interested you, straight after the lecture has been given Don’t feel you necessarily should be writing down something every minute during the lecture, or even every five minutes, and don’t worry about how much or little those around you seem to be scribbling Remember that lectures are not, principally, for instruction (though some may contain elements of this); the benefit you take from them may reside as much (if not more) in the regular experience of listening to the elaboration of an argument (a skill you are here

to develop for yourself) as in building up a file of notes But some notes will clearly be handy – and you often won’t know at the time which page of lecture notes will later yield fruitful points

of return (For that reason, you should always record lecture titles and dates in your notes as a matter of course.)

TAKING NOTES FROM BOOKS

Always record your notes efficiently by heading them with the name of the author and/or editor, the title of the book or article, and the publication details: publisher, place, year (or journal title, volume number, year) You will need these details if in due course you reference this work in an essay Also with an eye to future essays, be careful when taking notes that you always distinguish

as clearly as possible between the ideas and words taken from the work in question and your own thoughts, reactions and comments (you could always initial the latter for clarity’s sake, or else keep them on a separate page from text-derived notes) You will find some critical books useful in their entirety, but many will be useful in part: an introduction, a specific chapter and/or material traced via the index might sometimes suffice Some books or articles, even if useful or absorbing, may be too generalized (or tangential to your concerns) for much note-taking to be appropriate; others may be so eloquent that you feel the temptation to transcribe more than you really need; often, a brief summary of a work and a few representative quotations will be enough

If the work you are reading is a core literary text that you will be talking and/or writing about, be

sure to jot down page references to key passages and insights that occur to you as you go along;

there will often be insufficient time for a full re-read, especially of very long works

GIVING A TUTORIAL OR SEMINAR PRESENTATION

Students are often required to give brief presentations in seminars (and occasionally in one-hour tutorials) Individual tutors will advise as to what is expected for specific teaching sessions, but the general principle is that presentations are intended to initiate debate by raising issues,

questions, and problems; they will often identify a particular passage (or passages) of the text (or texts) being discussed which the tutorial or seminar group might then go on to examine further

Bear in mind that a presentation is not supposed to be the final word on its designated subject Feel free to be speculative, to call attention to things you don’t understand, to problems, puzzles and obscurities Feel free also to make cross-references, if you think them fruitful, to other works

by the writer you are talking about (a quotation from a letter, say, or a sentence from an essay),

or to a brief quotation or phrase from literary criticism or theory, or to an especially relevant historical detail Passing comparisons to texts studied earlier in the course might also be of use,

as, on occasion, might a very brief handout for fellow students – although this often won’t be necessary Try to avoid unduly summarizing what will already have been read and considered by the group ahead of the teaching session; you should seek to develop, illustrate or play with the ideas everyone has encountered in their reading, not simply restate them

A presentation should not be written out word for word beforehand, but should be improvised from notes and addressed to the group clearly (with a bit of eye contact, if possible) and at an appropriate speed Don’t rush through it But don’t exceed the stipulated time either; if a tutor asks for a five or ten minute presentation, you should be fairly sure beforehand that what you want to say will be delivered within the requested duration Over-long presentations reduce group discussion time (a precious commodity) and can throw the tutor’s plan for what will be covered during the session as a whole They also often attempt to take on more than is required

The prospect of giving a presentation often makes people nervous; the reality is generally not half as stressful as feared Remember that you only need to speak for a few minutes, that others

in your group will probably be nervous about presentations too (and thus will be with you in silent sympathy), that your role is simply to start the ball rolling, not to carry the burden of the session on behalf of your peers, and, above all, that you are NOT ON TRIAL! There is no

expectation that you deliver a set-piece performance; you simply need to draw together, as clearly

as possible, a few ideas and quotations (or references to textual moments) in order to provide prompts for further discussion Remember also that you have probably done something like this already at school, and that the experience will be useful for future job situations that involve addressing a group of people

Those not giving a presentation should not feel the week’s duties have passed to another group member; indeed, a good way of preparing for any tutorial or seminar is to imagine what you would say, were you the presenter As the presentation is given, listen out for correspondences between what is being said and what interests you in the text(s) under discussion Does the

presentation raise new questions or issues? Does anything in its contents alter your point of view,

or clarify a previously grey area? How would you like to follow up on any of the issues being raised? Once the presentation has finished, chances are it will be over to you…

PLANNING AND WRITING ESSAYS

The kind of essay which you produce at university should be much more developed and

extended than your sixth-form or equivalent essays were, but it will probably take you some time

to work up to this This is why grades for first-year essays and exams do not count towards your degree mark; you have time to experiment, gain experience and benefit from feedback and

guidance

There is no fixed structure with which the English essays you write at Bristol must comply, no single approach which must be adopted, and no uniform style in which essays must be written Different strategies can quite legitimately be employed on different occasions, depending on the demands of the particular subject and the interests and intentions of the individual writer

Specific guidance on points of composition and referencing is provided in the Style Guide

section of this booklet, but below is some generalized, NON-PRESCRIPTIVE advice about approaching the essay-writing task

Responding to Titles

While some written assignments invite response to a set question (or one of a choice of

questions), you will find that university essay titles often take the form of a statement by a critic which you are invited to discuss You must understand and take up the terms of the statement, and follow through on its implications when analyzing specific features of the text or texts to which it refers, or is being made to refer Keeping the title in mind is part of what gives an essay shape and direction: there needs to be a trajectory of thought that the reader can trace and stay with, even if there are complications in your elaboration of ideas Sometimes this trajectory will

be an ‘argument’ that advances claim X (and possibly also opposes it to claim Y), but sometimes the ‘argument’ (so-called) will be less obviously argumentative and more in the nature of an unfolding enquiry This is fine, so long as the essay has an intelligible structure and sense of progression

You should regard every essay as an attempt to persuade your reader of a particular point of view (or way of reading), but that doesn’t mean that you have to be stridently for or against a title proposition or reductive in your approach Sound critical thinking is often tentative or marked by ambivalence, and it is perfectly acceptable to take an ‘on the one hand … on the other’ approach

to a given title, affirming its implications in certain respects while questioning them in others

The Planning Stage

Suppose you have chosen (or been given) a particular essay title, that you have dwelt on its

implications and started to think through its relevance to the texts (or texts) to which your essay will respond, and that you have read and taken relevant notes from both primary (that is, literary) and secondary (that is, critical, theoretical or contextual) works At this point, you are not, of

course, necessarily ready to begin writing; after all, a heap of notes is not, in itself, a plan You

might, at this stage, want to draw up a list of numbered points, perhaps with some key self and a central quotation (or more than one) attached to each You need to move from a

notes-to-welter of ideas to a line of thought This line will partly emerge through composition, but it

should also, up to a point, be traced out in advance If it isn’t, you run two major risks: doubling back on yourself in the essay, and running out of space for points and examples you had hoped

to include

Try to think of planning as a process of both accumulation and sifting One often notes down more observations and quotations than an essay of a prescribed length will easily accommodate, and deciding what to leave out can often be as tricky as determining what to prioritize Working

on a PC can be helpful in this regard: using the cut and paste facility to move around your notes and play with the possible running order of paragraph points can help you make that all-

important leap from a bundle of ideas to a curve of thought If you feel that too much

transposing of material is going on, you may need to take a step back and consider repositioning the frames of your enquiry Similarly, if you feel that too many quotations or ‘side issue’ points are crowding your notes, be discriminating and remove the surplus material (You might shunt such material to the foot of your document or create a parallel file headed, say, ‘surplus.doc’; if your ideas change in due course, you can always move relegated notes back into the design.) Do not start writing the essay itself if your notes are still in a muddle KEEP THE PLAN SIMPLE And remember that you cannot say everything

The Writing Stage

Be prepared to attempt two or three rough versions of your introduction, until you feel you are happy with the particular slant, or the well-phrased provisionality, of your opening remarks Good introductions come in many forms, but are often relatively brief and to the point, without conveying a reductive or dogmatic response to the central proposition with which they are

engaged; they are in touch with the implications of the title and identify the outlines of the

territory one is about to chart It is quite possible that the introduction may be both the first and the last paragraph you write, in that you may wish to revise some of your opening formulations

in the light of what you find you have gone on to say, but the fact that an essay may, up to a point, discover its own direction in the act of composition is not a justification for putting off the writing of a draft introduction until the end: it is unlikely that you will be ready to develop a clear, coherent argument until you have formulated (however tentatively) an initial response to the subject in hand

Avoid the temptation to use page one of your essay to ‘warm up’ Resist in particular the sluggish

‘George Eliot was born in 1819’ kind of build-up Also avoid plot summaries You have a case to prove, or a line of thinking to develop, and you must not defer or distract from the task in hand Contextual and/or historical facts must always earn their place in an essay of literary criticism They should be drawn upon with discrimination at those points where the detail supplied

enhances the persuasiveness of what you are asserting KEEP IT RELEVANT!

Every paragraph has a discrete amount of work to do, and often its central purpose will be clear from its opening sentence At the very least, you should bear in mind that your reader will

probably respond to this first sentence as an orientation point, so veering too abruptly away from

it in what follows is liable to confuse You may be familiar with the ‘state-quote-analyze’ model for a paragraph often touted in schools, and this does provide a helpful, if rudimentary, starting

point for thinking about the paragraph as a unit of thought that defines and develops a particular stage in an unfolding enquiry But, of course, a reductive application of this model to one’s

writing might lead to a pastry-cutter approach since different paragraphs often need to do

different kinds of intellectual work The key thing is to consider carefully the primary function of each paragraph in turn – in which regard you should avoid both the fragmentary, ‘unfulfilled’ and the rambling, ‘over-stuffed’ paragraph Also, always ask yourself whether your breaks between one paragraph and the next are likely to seem arbitrary or well-judged to your reader

Quotations will, of course, provide important staging posts in the elaboration of your ‘argument’

or enquiry; in many paragraphs, your points will be supported by textual examples which will then be analysed in sufficient depth and detail to bring out the full force of the claims you are making – or the ideas you are pursuing.Take time (ideally at the planning stage) to choose

exactly the right passages to illustrate your points Make sure that you quote neither less nor more of each passage than you need; there is no virtue in copying out huge chunks of a text, and often a few words will make your point more effectively Don’t leave your quotations to do all your argumentative work for you: they don’t necessarily speak for themselves and you will

usually need to explore their significance in your own words – which doesn’t, of course, mean that you should inertly paraphrase what you have quoted Your reader’s attention needs to be drawn to the particular features of the quotation (salient words or images, metrical, rhetorical or rhythmical effects, and so forth) which support and help you develop your line of reading

How to end an essay is often tricky One danger is that the conclusion may come across as a stockpile of previously unmade (or under-developed) points Another is that it may include

excessive recycling of ideas already sufficiently expressed: there is quite a difference between striking a summarizing note and going back over well-trodden ground Learning from the

practice of critics you admire may prove particularly useful in suggesting alternative ways of rounding off an enquiry And, as with introductions, experimenting with draft versions can pay great dividends here In particular, a resonant and clarifying final sentence can often provide a satisfying sense of closure

Always aim to ‘touch the far side’ of an essay AT LEAST twenty-four hours before the deadline for submission (preferably earlier) You should then revise the work, re-reading it several times and with scrupulous attention In part, you will be ‘proofing’ the work by checking for

grammatical, punctuation or spelling errors; but you also need to attend to the fluency of the argument as a whole, and may find that you have to rephrase, cut or expand various formulations

in order to enhance clarity Above all, you must think of revision as an integral part of the

composition process, rather than an optional extra stage Indeed, the revising intelligence is central to your development as an essayist, as the following paragraph makes clear

After the Event

Every essay you write can and should be better than the one before You are more likely to

achieve this goal by setting aside regular time for thinking specifically about composition:

working through this booklet and Plain English, and going back over old essays Build this activity

in to your week-to-week timetable It might be good practice to re-read each essay closely and in

full TWICE after it has been marked: once just after you have got it back and again just before you begin your next written assignment This re-reading process ought to be constructive and pro-active, an exercise in heightening style-consciousness; be sure to identify and cross-question your own peculiar habits and tics as a writer, and to outstare those technical glitches currently impeding full fluency In your first few re-reading experiences, you may well find that you need

to pore over your work slowly, unpicking and recasting in your mind any unsatisfactory phrases;

if your script is heavily annotated, it would help greatly to revise and edit the essay on screen, for your own benefit, in the light of the marker’s comments (Obviously, the marker would not be able to look over, or take into consideration, such after-the-event revisions.) Rest assured,

though, that you will pick up speed in this activity provided that you remain vigilant and are determined to detect and deal with your foibles Clearly, the pay-off in terms of confidence-growth can be considerable - and confidence itself (as we all know from our happiest writing experiences) can inspire fine and persuasive phrasing

PLAGIARISM, AND HOW TO AVOID IT

This section is intended as an elucidatory supplement to, and not a substitute for, the entry on

plagiarism in the English department’s Undergraduate Handbook Please make sure you read (or

re-read) that section very carefully and then consider the following

It is your responsibility to ensure that you do not fall under any suspicion of plagiarism Even when plagiarism is not a deliberate attempt at cheating – for example, if it is the result of careless note-taking – it will still be penalized For this reason, you should always be careful, when taking notes from critical material, to record clearly when you are copying out passages from your source word-for-word, when you are summarizing the critic’s ideas in your own words, and when you are supplementing these ideas with your own observations and examples If you are vigilant on this score, then avoiding the incorporation of unattributed or unacknowledged

quotation or close paraphrase in your essays should not be difficult

Bear in mind that there is no literary criticism which is not, at some level or other, indebted to the ideas and arguments of others; indeed, some of the best criticism is formed explicitly as a response to another critic’s work In your essays, you will find yourself wanting to make use of material which you have encountered in critical books and essays; this will include factual

information, critical propositions and detailed remarks, and perhaps phrases which seem to you

to encapsulate especially well (or poorly) a reading of a poem, novel or play The crucial thing, once you have identified the critical material which looks useful, is to draw upon it without

falling into the ‘plagiarism trap’

You must first distinguish between different kinds of indebtedness: crudely, these could be called indebtedness for information and indebtedness for ideas A third variety of indebtedness is of a specifically verbal kind

Indebtedness for Information

A good deal of information in literary studies is, essentially, held in common amongst all critics and students of the subject: you do not, ordinarily, have to acknowledge this For example, you

may not have known that T S Eliot’s poem The Waste Land was published in 1922, but the critic

you are reading mentions this If you want to make use of the fact in your essay, there is no need

to credit that critic specifically Or again, the fact that John Keats wrote ‘Ode to Psyche’ as well

as ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ is not the unique discovery of the critic of the Odes you have been reading So, while certain areas of factual information may be unique to the critic (and such

discoveries the rationale for his or her article or book being published), most factual

information about literature is not anyone’s property and can go unreferenced If you remain in doubt in any particular case, cite your source, and ask your tutor afterwards whether or not this was indeed appropriate

Indebtedness for Ideas

Here, citation and acknowledgement are always required When you want to quote from a critic, you must always acknowledge your source in a note If you wish to condense and paraphrase what a critic says, again you must make it clear that this is what you are doing, either in the text

of your essay or in a note Some students express anxiety about how they are to make use of the ideas put before them in the course of lectures If you are following a lecturer’s argument closely

at a certain point in your essay, or if you are citing the same examples as used in the lecture, you should say so in a relevant note You should also know when the lecturer is quoting or

paraphrasing another critic (she or he will have said so in the lecture); if you are in any doubt, consult the lecturer in question

Verbal Indebtedness

Very often, critics can provide you with phrases or sentences which you feel could be used

effectively in the context of your own argument – either because they provide an idea which you can develop and illustrate in your own way or because you wish to take issue with a particular statement and define your own critical approach against it Here, again, you must always

acknowledge your source, and do so in every case of such quotation It is not enough to cite the critic once if you have in fact made use of his or her words on several occasions in the essay; nor

is it sufficient to put the critic’s book in your bibliography whilst failing to indicate the precise points where he or she was quoted in the essay Remember that anybody’s words other than your own must ALWAYS appear within quotation marks, and the source must ALWAYS be given Some examples:

Below is a passage from Alastair Fowler, A History of English Literature (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987),

pp 50-51:

The sonnet sequence in English derived ultimately from Dante’s La Vita

Nuova and, more especially, from Petrarch’s Canzoniere This great

masterpiece haunted Europe with its metaphysical vision of love’s

subjectivity as a hyperbolic, paradoxical state of contradicted being […]

Typical Elizabethan sequences (and there are scores of them) consist of 100

or more sonnets, interspersed with other lyric genres – songs, in Astrophil

and Stella Often the array is rounded off with a long poem, such as

Spenser’s ‘Epithalamion’ or Shakespeare’s ‘A Lover’s Complaint’, the whole

forming a numerological pattern in imitation of Petrarch’s

If you were writing an essay on the sonnet, and you wished to make use of this passage, you might incorporate it like this:

Italian works such as La Vita Nuova by Dante and the Canzoniere by

Petrarch were strong influences on the English sonnet sequence Alastair

Fowler, who makes a case for the particular importance of Dante in this

respect, has written of the ‘metaphysical vision of love’s subjectivity’ as

being central to this influence.1 In English sonnet sequences, songs and

other forms of lyric can be mixed in with sonnets, while the sequences can

be finished with a longer poem – as with the ‘Epithalamion’ which

concludes Spenser’s Amoretti (1595), or the narrative poem ‘The Lover’s

Complaint’, printed at the end of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (1609) Fowler sees

also a tendency towards numerological patterning in English sequences,

which he claims imitates Petrarch’s practice.2

1 Alastair Fowler, A History of English Literature (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987),

p 50

2 Ibid, p 51

[Advice on referencing conventions is given in the Style Guide later in this booklet.]

Here, the indebtedness is acknowledged, both to specific verbal formulations and to ideas The information incorporated is the ‘common’ information which does not need specific

acknowledgement – but notice that the essay writer here makes that information a little more specific than it is in the Fowler, by supplying dates for the Spenser and the Shakespeare

Below is an example of a plagiarized version, where the Fowler is being passed off as the essay writer’s own work:

English sonnet sequences are ultimately derived from Dante’s La Vita

Nuova and Petrarch’s Canzoniere, a great masterpiece which had a

metaphysical vision of the subjectivity of love: this was a hyperbolic and

paradoxical state of contradicted being There are scores of typical

Elizabethan sequences, and they consist of more than 100 sonnets,

interspersed with songs and lyric genres, as in Astrophil and Stella Spenser

rounds off the sequence with a long poem, such as his ‘Epithalamion’ In

Shakespeare’s ‘The Lover’s Complaint’, the whole forms a numerological

pattern in imitation of Petrarch’s

Throughout this passage, the writer is either quoting Fowler or paraphrasing him very closely, and no acknowledgement of this is made Even if Fowler’s book were to appear in the essay’s bibliography, this would be a clear case of plagiarism And even if a footnote number were to be added after the closing word above and a reference given, it would not be sufficiently clear – as it

is in the previous example – quite where the debt to Fowler begins and ends; this, too, is

problematic and falls within the spectrum of practices considered plagiaristic Note also how, in making small changes to and rearrangements of Fowler, the writer has garbled the source, with the result that what is written makes poor sense

The Importance of Originality

You should not think that drawing upon literary criticism in your essays is governed solely by the need to avoid plagiarism or that, so long as you avoid plagiarism, you can be passive in your relation to the critics you read and cite It is important that you should be able to think through critics’ ideas in your own terms and explore and develop them in your own idiom, rather than merely transmitting them (albeit with due acknowledgement) in your essay Critical works do not contain the ‘answers’ to the kinds of literary problems your essays explore, but they can help you

in bringing those problems into clearer focus Good undergraduate writing does more than

invoke critics as authorities who do the intellectual work for them: it engages with the ideas of

others in order to sharpen its own perceptions and give an edge to its own arguments

Self-Plagiarism

The English department will regard the re-use of your own essays (or even small sections of them) as ‘self-plagiarism’ While you may return to the same subjects or works in essays for different units, or within a unit, to avoid self-plagiarism you must not only avoid the verbatim or near-verbatim re-use of previously submitted essays in part or whole but also ensure that your return to the same subjects or works involves a rethinking of your ideas Self-plagiarism is also a serious disciplinary matter

Plagiarism-Angst

Finally, a few words of reassurance: some students worry initially that they may commit an act of plagiarism unintentionally; in fact, this is most unlikely, since good, normal critical practice,

where sources are acknowledged as a matter of course, makes plagiarism very difficult As a rule:

if you’re worried that you might be in the ‘plagiarism trap’, even though you have acknowledged your sources, you are most unlikely to have anything to be concerned about

THE STYLE GUIDE

(Revised Version, 2011)

Introduction

The Style Guide part of this booklet itemizes issues to do with grammar, punctuation, phrasing, and

so forth, in order to help you achieve accurate and effective expression in your essays Also

included in these pages are detailed requirements for the correct use of quotations, and for the clear and consistent presentation of references and a bibliography You should expect to consult this guide regularly, and you would do well to read it in its entirety as soon as possible (perhaps one section at a time, at different sittings)

Some of the entries that follow will touch on unfamiliar matter, and these may take a little time to absorb and put into practice Others may strike you as glaringly obvious, and their inclusion may come as a surprise Every entry, though, has earned its place in the Style Guide: what follows is, essentially, a compilation by lecturers in the English department of errors and shortcomings found repeatedly in the essays they have marked In this sense, former Bristol English students are, if not quite the authors, at least the unwitting commissioners of the guide!

Obviously, there is much in the style and substance of an individual writer’s work that eludes

generalization, and for which rules and recommendations are inappropriate Your essay-markers will want to engage with this, and to comment on the intellectual content of your work, and not simply on the mechanics of its delivery and presentation (although it is vital to appreciate that

content and expression are ultimately indissociable: a good idea in one’s head will not be such a good idea on the page if it is poorly delivered) The marker’s desire to engage with the distinctive concerns and characteristics of each essay is part of the point of issuing this Style Guide: it sets down in one place the various problems that occur in numerous essays – and it elaborates upon these in greater detail than could be managed, for reasons of time and space, in the margins of your work – so that markers can combine comments on matters specific to your argument with shorthand alerts to style problems, secure in the knowledge that the latter are glossed adequately here

Do remember that even copious annotation of your work may not be comprehensive and that, when taking stock of marked essays, you should be alert to other potential problems in your

writing that the assessor may have only selectively identified in their comments You can always

supplement the written feedback you receive with additional notes-to-self, using the Style Guide

as an aid in that process In due course, you should, ideally, become your own best editor But this will take time – and vigilance

The entries in this booklet are not all of the same order of importance and do not weigh equally heavily in the determination of an essay grade The most significant entries are the ones to do with the clear and effective delivery of your ideas – in other words, basic writing skills Others (to do with the finer points of formatting or referencing, for instance) spell out what may, at first, be

unclear to you in terms of dominant scholarly conventions These matters may not be as

fundamental as the delivery of grammatically accurate, properly punctuated sentences; nonetheless,

you must appreciate that any lack of clarity or consistency in your work will prove distracting to the reader and take at least some attention away from the ideas you are advancing The sooner you resolve points of confusion regarding the protocols of academic presentation, the sooner they will cease to feel burdensome

It is your responsibility to ensure that, as your writing develops, your essays conform to all the expectations and are free from all the errors and impediments described in this guide This may seem a daunting prospect at the outset, but, as you read on, you will hopefully see that many of the issues covered are familiar to you already The kinds of technical error to which essayists are usually prone are actually fairly few in number, and each essayist will most likely have her or his own

personal profile of pitfalls: a small clutch of problems that recur from essay to essay Even students who pride themselves on technical accuracy and an elegant prose style have flaws and blind spots; there will doubtless be entries in the guide that will help such students to improve further

Remember that most stylistic hang-ups, once confronted and comprehended, simply fall away – never to return Remember also that taking care over the verbal framing of an idea is itself an

intellectual process by which one refines and develops that very idea; time and again, you will

discover that well-judged, technically sound phrasing has a tendency to lead you on to fresh insights

as you write Needless to say, the writing process becomes ever more pleasurable as result

Useful Supplements to this Guide

You are strongly encouraged to purchase and work your way through Plain English, ed by Diané

Collinson et al, 2nd edn (Buckingham: Open University Press, 2001) It is also worth knowing

about The MHRA Style Guide: A Handbook for Authors, Editors, And Writers of Theses, 2nd edn

(London: Modern Humanities Research Association, 2008), on which the English department’s recommended conventions for the presentation of footnotes and bibliographies are based (Note

that the section on references in Plain English describes different conventions; to avoid

confusion, this section is best overlooked.) The requirements for referencing texts according to the MHRA method are hopefully summarized adequately in the following pages, so chances are you won’t need to consult this publication often (if at all), but do turn to it if a point of scholarly presentation on which you are not clear arises The MHRA’s booklet is available in the Arts and Social Sciences Library, and the latest version is accessible on the web at

http://www.mhra.org.uk/Downloads/index.html Also potentially useful are:

Gordon Jarvie, Chambers Punctuation Guide (Edinburgh: Chambers, 1992)

Gordon Taylor, The Student’s Writing Guide for the Arts and Social Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1989)

R L Trask, Mind the Gaffe: The Penguin Guide to Common Errors in English (London: Penguin, 2002)

WARNING: The grammar check facility on Microsoft Word is unreliable It often

suggests inappropriate changes to perfect prose and misses errors in imperfect prose It should not be relied upon as a substitute for one’s own grammatical competence If using this facility, proceed with great caution…

A: ESSAY FORMAT AND STRUCTURE

A1 Format Requirements

VERY IMPORTANT: Make sure that you follow the exact requirements for the formatting of

all essays (spacing, margins, font size, lineation, and so forth) as described in the ‘Academic

Guidance’ section of the English Undergraduate Handbook See, specifically, the entry headed

‘Presentation and Layout of Work’

A2 Paragraphs

A general account of the importance of effective paragraphing is given in the entry ‘The Writing Stage’ in the ‘Planning and Writing Essays’ section of this booklet The points below provide a checklist of things you should bear in mind in order to make sure that your paragraphs are in good working order

a.) Indentations

Make sure you indent the first line of each paragraph bar the first in your essay, so that it is

absolutely clear where it begins (This is preferable to leaving a blank line between paragraphs as some paragraphs begin at the start of a new page and thus might not be perceived as new.) Make

sure also that you do not indent the first line of your prose underneath an inset quotation (see section E: QUOTATIONS below) – unless, of course, you intend to herald a new paragraph at

this point (In most cases, a new paragraph just here will probably be inappropriate, since one usually sets aside a chunk of text on the page in order to analyze, or at least provide some kind of follow-up response to the implications of, what has been quoted; it makes sense to include this commentary in the paragraph already in progress.)

d.) The Over-Stuffed Paragraph

Some paragraphs suffer from the attempt to juggle more ideas and examples than can be

successfully integrated Although there are no fixed rules on how long (or short) a paragraph should be, if it runs for significantly more than one A4 page of double-spaced prose, then there

is a fair chance that it is trying to follow too many competing agendas

e.) The Broken or ‘Unfulfilled’ Paragraph

Sometimes it can feel than an essayist has been trigger-happy with the carriage-return (or ‘Enter’) key, and that arbitrary breaks have been inserted during, rather than at the end of, the elaboration

of a particular idea At other times, a miniature paragraph can seem like a shard of prose

containing a disruptive side-point that could not be taken far but that the author simply did not want to leave out In the latter case, the reader often senses that the essay might have been more persuasive and fluent without the digression

opinions

B: PUNCTUATION

Think of punctuation as a system of sign-posting that guides the reader through your sentences, separating the main point from asides and qualifications; if you put any of the signs in the wrong place, you will point the reader in the wrong direction Of course, many issues to do with

punctuation will be familiar to you already However, you may also have niggling problems or unresolved dilemmas This section lists many of the most commonly encountered instances of misleading punctuation in students’ essays (Punctuation errors around quotations are glossed in

section E: QUOTATIONS below.)

B1 The Surplus Comma

In some cases, the use of a comma may be optional and neither its presence nor its absence mars the sense For instance, the preceding sentence could legitimately be re-punctuated as follows:

In some cases the use of a comma may be optional, and neither its presence nor its absence mars the sense

What is at issue in these variants is simply the finessing of emphasis or tempo, at the author’s discretion, in the delivery of the constituent parts of the sentence However, it is often the case that inserting a comma at a particular point within a sentence would be grammatically

unsupportable and unintelligible There should never be a comma, for example, between the subject and the main verb of a sentence unless they are separated by an additional clause or qualifier

WRONG: The amateur detective in Edmund Crispin’s novels, spends very little time on his day job

RIGHT: The amateur detective in Edmund Crispin’s novels, Gervase Fen, spends very little time on his day job

RIGHT: The amateur detective in Edmund Crispin’s novels spends very little time on his day job

B2 The Missing Comma

Never omit a comma where one is required to make the word relations within the sentence

intelligible Take the following example:

Many critics have read Heart of Darkness as an assault on colonialist exploitation, but

Chinua Achebe begs to differ with his judgment that Conrad was a racist

Can you see how the absence of a comma after ‘differ’ destabilizes the sense, generating an

accidental (in this case, illogical) implication at odds with what is meant?

B3 The Comma Splice

Two discrete sentence constructions should almost never be spliced together by using a comma instead of a full stop It is possible to cite exceptions – such as ‘You make the coffee, I’ll make the tea’ (technically, an example of ‘asyndeton’, a rhetorical figure which omits a grammatical conjunction) – but almost every instance of this surprisingly common and basic error in students’ essays is unsupportable because, unlike the example just cited, the comma is liable (however momentarily) to mislead More than that, it risks giving the impression that the author does not know what a sentence is

WRONG: Adriana is jealous, she feels her husband is neglecting her

RIGHT: Adriana is jealous because she feels her husband is neglecting her

RIGHT: Adriana is jealous; she feels her husband is neglecting her

B4 The Non-Sentence

Never leave a sentence construction grammatically incomplete Sometimes non-sentences are a result of inattentiveness or grammatical confusion, but sometimes they are consciously deployed for a particular tonal effect In the latter case, bear in mind that, although you may find sentence fragments (sentences, that is, without a main verb) in novels and journalistic writing, in literary criticism they can feel out of keeping, as if smuggled in from a different genre of writing

Consider the following example:

Bradley Headstone provides an extreme – if complex – illustration of the fatally minded, obsessive lover A danger to himself, and to others

single-The same point can be made in a number of grammatically supportable ways:

Bradley Headstone provides an extreme – if complex – illustration of the fatally minded, obsessive lover; he is a danger to himself, and to others

single-A danger to himself, and to others, Bradley Headstone provides an extreme – if complex – illustration of the fatally single-minded, obsessive lover

Bradley Headstone, a danger to himself, and to others, provides an extreme – if complex – illustration of the fatally single-minded, obsessive lover

B5 The Run-on Sentence

Two complete sentences cannot be run together without any punctuation

WRONG: They believe in Oedipus he is their king

These two statements should be separated by a full stop, or by a colon or semi-colon;

alternatively, one sentence could be made dependent on the other through an explanatory clause,

which might be introduced by because or who

RIGHT: They believe in Oedipus He is their king

RIGHT: They believe in Oedipus; he is their king

RIGHT: They believe in Oedipus because he is their king

RIGHT: They believe in Oedipus, who is their king

B6 The Subordinate Clause

Certain clauses within sentences function as asides, to be distinguished by commas from the main clause of the sentence These are generally known as subordinate clauses, but are also sometimes

termed dependent or embedded clauses The terms are differently applied by different

grammarians, but, for the sake of this entry, the basic principle is simple Consider the following example:

Paul Valéry’s words, with which Auden concurred, have a disquieting open-endedness

Note here how the commas, in effect, bracket the subordinate part of the sentence so that

what surrounds them can be read as a fully free-standing sentence in its own right:

Paul Valéry’s words have a disquieting open-endedness

On the same principle, be careful also to subordinate correctly such qualifying asides as ‘however’,

‘therefore’, ‘for example’, ‘then’ and ‘too’:

Paul Valéry’s words, however, have a disquieting open-endedness

Paul Valéry’s words, therefore, have a disquieting open-endedness

Paul Valéry’s words, for example, have a disquieting open-endedness

Paul Valéry’s words, then, have a disquieting open-endedness

Paul Valéry’s words, too, have a disquieting open-endedness

To place a comma on one side of the qualifying word(s) and not the other is clearly wrong

B7 The Optional Subordinate Clause

On some occasions, the use of commas to set up a subordinate clause may be optional – depending

on whether or not there is a risk of obscuring the sense of the sentence by not putting down these

markers In such instances, you must choose between providing two commas or none at all Be sure not to provide one and not the other, or you will skew the sense of your sentence

RIGHT: The joy they felt, on that first night, slowly withered into remorse

RIGHT: The joy they felt on that first night slowly withered into remorse

WRONG: The joy they felt on that first night, slowly withered into remorse

WRONG: The joy they felt, on that first night slowly withered into remorse

(Will they ever get over it?)

B8 Punctuation around the Titles of Literary Works

Be careful not to provide misleading punctuation when referring to an author’s work; for example,

it would be wrong to write ‘In her novel, Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë observes…’ The additional clause which brackets off Jane Eyre from the surrounding words implies that Charlotte Brontë wrote one novel and that Jane Eyre was its title In fact, she wrote four Either of the following would be fine: ‘In her first novel, Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë observes…’ (the additional clause here identifies the title of that first novel) or (with no additional clause) ‘In her novel Jane Eyre Charlotte Brontë observes…’ (A comma after ‘Eyre’ would be optional in this case; neither its presence nor its

absence would affect the sense.)

B9 Punctuation around the Word ‘However’

The punctuation provided before and/or after the word ‘however’ is inaccurate in a surprisingly

high percentage of cases Only in certain circumstances should the word appear after a comma This

is an acceptable usage:

Hennimore’s sentence makes sense, however you read it

In this instance, the ‘however’ clause properly qualifies the clause preceding it and cannot mislead the reader The following, however, is an incorrect – because misleading – usage:

Hennimore’s point begins intelligibly enough, however, as it develops, it begins to cause confusion

These are two discrete sentence constructions (see entry B3 above) and should be rendered thus:

Hennimore’s point begins intelligibly enough However, as it develops, it begins to cause confusion

(You may, alternatively, link the two sentence constructions here, since the one relates to the other

so closely, by means of a semi-colon, rather than a full stop; see entry B10 below.)

Consider also the differing implications of inserting or omitting a comma after the word ‘however’: a

sentence beginning ‘However one reads ’ is not at all the same as one beginning ‘However, one reads…’ In the former, the whole opening phrase is being offered as a qualifying remark to what will follow (and can be paraphrased as ‘In whatever way one reads…’); in the latter, the word

‘however’ acts as a qualifier by itself Be sure which usage you intend and avoid forcing the reader

to do a double-take

B10 The Semi-Colon and Colon

Many people use one of these when the other would be more appropriate, or employ one or both

in ways that are at odds with how the punctuation marks are commonly understood to function It

must be admitted that there are some varying conventions and opinions regarding their usage in specific types of grammatical construction, but this small degree of divergent thinking in relatively

uncommon cases does not mean that correct versus incorrect usage is not easy to establish in the

vast majority of cases As a general rule, when choosing between the two punctuation points, it may

be helpful to think of the semi-colon as a way of identifying two semi-detached but related

sentences, and of the colon as a way of identifying the content of sentence two as the illustration of,

or direct follow-up to, the content of sentence one

a.) The Semi-Colon

Except when they are used to separate items in list, semi-colons function to mark the end of a complete grammatical sentence – though in a less final way than full stops The choice of a semi-colon indicates that the two sentences are closely linked, and that the writer wants them to be

considered together The thoughts contained in them are grammatically independent, but

logically dependent on each other, as in the following examples:

In the first draft, Plath wrote ‘husband’; in the second, she wrote ‘bastard’

I am not trying to be provocative; I am merely trying to explain

Notice how in both examples the points the sentences make are more interdependent than a full stop would have suggested

Sometimes the linking semi-colon may be accompanied by a conjunctive adverb such as

‘therefore’, ‘however’ or ‘besides’

The auditorium was full; however, she was able to watch from the wings

Semi-colons should never be employed to introduce quotations, nor should they be used hazily

information, which may come in the form of a word or phrase, a sentence, a list, or a quotation (but the last of these only in certain instances, as entry E7 below makes clear) It should only be used to link sentences if the latter reads as a corollary of the former

The poem enacts the very process it describes: it collapses into fragments

You will need to bring the following: a cricket bat, a cane umbrella, a spy-glass, a revolver, and a clean pair of driving gloves

Ilsa’s presence in Casablanca could mean only one thing: trouble

Normally a sentence should not contain more than one colon

B11 The Apostrophe

Apostrophes have two major functions:

i.) They indicate that one or more letters have been omitted: for example, ‘can’t’, ‘o’er’ In critical

essays you should avoid informal abbreviations such as ‘can’t’, ‘won’t’, ‘didn’t’, and so forth

(except in quotations, of course)

ii.) They indicate possession The apostrophe is placed before the final s in singular nouns:

Shakespeare’s, Eliot’s It is placed after the final s in plural nouns: the Romantics’ morbidity, the Georgians’ wistful nostalgia When the plural form of the noun does not have a final s, the

apostrophe is placed before the possessive s – as in the case of ‘children’s books’ or ‘people’s rights’ When a noun or proper name ends in s, it still takes ’s in the possessive form: Keats’s odes; Jones’s argument; the princess’s refusal However, it is usual to omit the final s in proper

names that are Latin or Greek in form, although the apostrophe is still necessary: Aeneas’ story; Odysseus’ cunning; Aristophanes’ comedies In hyphenated words, only the final word takes the apostrophe to form the possessive: ‘the mother-in-law’s jealousy’

B12 The Apostrophe and Decades

Apostrophes should not be used in the numerical description of decades: one should refer to the 1930s, not the 1930’s With nothing to abbreviate, and no call for a possessive, the use of an

apostrophe in such an instance is unwarranted

B13 Its and It’s, Whose and Who’s

There is a great deal of unnecessary confusion over the difference between its and it’s Without

an apostrophe, its is the possessive form of it; this is the exception that proves the rule about the use of apostrophes to indicate possession With an apostrophe, it’s is the abbreviated form of it

is The form its’ does not exist Similarly, whose is the possessive form of who; who’s is the

abbreviated form of who is The form whos’ does not exist either Possessive pronouns such as hers and ours do not take apostrophes

B14 The Dash

Dashes need to be distinguished from hyphens A hyphen links two words together as a

‘compound’ word (for example, alter-ego), with no character spaces around the hyphen Dashes

do require a character space on either side (this immediately visually distinguishes them from hyphens) and are used to indicate which part of the sentence in which they occur functions as either a supplement or an aside The single dash can be used as an alternative to a colon, but it can strike a more abrupt or informal note, and so may have the effect of conveying a

spontaneous afterthought

That speech changes our conception of the character – she seems much stronger

We expect the hero to make a fatal mistake – and indeed he does

Two dashes can be used to mark an interruption or digression, as you might use brackets or a pair of commas

It is startling to hear the chief business of so many romances – seeking honour in arms – dismissed in a single couplet

You should not use dashes as a regular alternative to brackets or commas Too many of them in quick succession can impart a jerky, idiosyncratic quality to one’s prose

B15 The Exclamation Mark

These should be used with great caution They tend to suggest that the writer is over-excited, or that the reader needs help in understanding the point being made

B16 Brackets and Punctuation

When providing full sentences inside brackets put the full-stop before the closing bracket Note also that commas should never appear before opening brackets; this applies to the presentation

of bibliographical details, as described in F2(c)

C: WORD ORDER AND WORD RELATIONS

This section highlights various cases of grammatically flawed and/or inadvertently misleading relations between parts of a sentence If words do not connect with each other in the way that was intended, then, even if the reader can work out what you meant to say, the sense will still be

compromised

C1 Confusing Word Order

Be sure not to arrange the constituent parts of your sentence in such a way as to confuse

Consider, for example, the difference between these two sentences (neither of which is

grammatically wrong, but one of which is grammatically misleading):

Poe writes in sensationalist terms of the horror of being buried alive

Poe writes of the horror of being buried alive in sensationalist terms

Note also the following distinction:

WRONG: In Primo Levi’s poem ‘The Opus’, he writes …

RIGHT: In his poem ‘The Opus’, Primo Levi writes …

Awkwardness can also arise when handling bracketed asides:

AWKWARD: From the Wife of Bath’s (the older woman’s) point of view …

CLEAR: From the point of view of the Wife of Bath (the older woman) …

C2 Unintentional Ambiguity

Accidental double-meanings sometimes creep into one’s writing, as in this case:

While both authors express their views in different ways…

This has two possible meanings, forcing the reader to guess whether you are referring to a

difference between the two authors’ views or to the fact that each author independently conveys more than one point of view Rephrasing will clarify the point:

While the two authors differ in the way in which they express their views…

There are many ways of accidentally misleading the reader by activating two (or more)

implications where only one was intended If, for example, you were to write the sentence ‘Her poem contemplates the dreadful violation of the Holocaust’, you may mean simply to convey the sense that the victims of the Holocaust suffered a dreadful violation and that the author’s poem meditates upon this, but your choice of wording would also bring in a confusing, alternative implication (that the Holocaust itself was subject to a dreadful violation); just because the reader could probably determine the point you intended from the context in which this sentence occurs, you should not have forced her or him to puzzle over the inadvertent ambiguity (In this case, the reader might have wondered if you had in mind misrepresentations, or even denials, of the Holocaust – ‘violations’ of a different kind – but the form of wording you chose might have left them unsure.)

C3 Misattribution of Terms

Be careful not to attribute the qualities of one thing to another inappropriately

WRONG: Unlike the portrait of the Wife of Bath, Rosalind is the embodiment of youth and beauty

The comparison of the person with the portrait is clumsy, and slightly to one side of the

intended meaning

RIGHT: Unlike the Wife of Bath, Rosalind is the embodiment of youth and beauty

C4 Losing Sense within a Sentence

Sometimes sentences lose sight of, or just slightly let slip, the point they originally set out to make

In many such cases, they fall prey to what is technically called ‘anacoluthon’, a term used to

describe the passing from one grammatical construction to another before the former is

completed An example:

If it were not for the penetration of daylight, the Count had certainly drunk his fill

Presumably, one of these two alternatives was intended (but the instance of anacoluthon does not make clear which):

If it were not for the penetration of daylight, the Count would have carried on drinking

By the time daylight had penetrated, the Count had certainly drunk his fill

C5 Unattached Participles

a.) The Dangling Participle

This problem arises when the first phrase of a sentence contains a participle form of a verb

(often marked by the ending –ing, –ed or -en) that one expects to see applied to a particular

subject, only for the next part of the sentence to apply the verb inappropriately to a different subject, as in this example:

Fearfully awaiting his death sentence, Dickens accords Fagin a new level of sympathy

It is Fagin, not Dickens, who faces the prospect of execution, and yet the grammatical structure of the sentence suggests otherwise: the word ‘awaiting’ – the present participle of the verb ‘to await’ –

is left ‘dangling’ because it is not grammatically linked to the noun (‘Fagin’) to which it belongs

It is not just confusion between author and character that leaves participles dangling The intrusion

of the reader into a sentence often serves the same effect:

In concealing the green girdle we see Gawain’s deceitfulness

It is not we who are concealing the girdle, but Gawain He is the implied subject of the first clause, and so the reader expects him to be the subject of the main clause too Either of these would do:

In concealing the green girdle Gawain shows his deceitfulness

When Gawain conceals the green girdle, we see his deceitfulness

b.) Other Unattached Participles

Sometimes a participle in the final clause or phrase of a sentence is not properly connected to the preceding matter:

Jane Eyre resists Rochester’s advances, reflecting the dictates of convention

Here, the participle ‘reflecting’ is not intelligibly governed by any earlier word in the sentence There

is an inaccurate, quasi-linkage of ‘Jane Eyre’ and the participle, but it is not Jane herself who reflects the dictates; rather, it is what she does An accurate version of the sentence, then, might read:

Jane Eyre resists Rochester’s advances, her actions reflecting the dictates of convention

D: ERRORS, DANGERS AND GREY AREAS

This section is something of a miscellany Its entries are arranged alphabetically rather than in

defined clusters as the points they cover elude neat categorization Each entry identifies a

characteristic writing tendency found repeatedly in student essays or highlights a compositional issue deserving further thought In some cases, the matter is not necessarily one of right versus wrong usage; certain entries are more ‘reflective’, aiming to describe a particular quirk or writing habit that can impede fluent and effective expression

D1 Abbreviations

Scholarly convention dictates that it is preferable to avoid abbreviations such as ‘e.g.’, ‘i.e.’, and ‘etc’

in academic writing and that the phrases ‘for example’, ‘that is’, and ‘and so forth’ are more

appropriate In general, you should shun abbreviations as far as possible in the main body of your prose (although the use of ‘p.’ for ‘page’, ‘pp.’ for pages’, ‘l.’ for ‘line’ and ‘ll.’ for ‘lines’, as used in

footnotes, is also generally used in bracketed references within the essay itself: see section F:

REFERENCES AND FOOTNOTES below) You should also avoid shortening ‘cannot’ to

‘can’t’, ‘I will’ to ‘I’ll’, ‘first’ to ‘1st’, ‘one’ to ‘1’ (again, unless you are providing a bracketed page or line number), ‘nineteenth century’ to ‘19th century’, and so forth

D2 Alliteration, Assonance and Sibilance

It is commonplace, and at times effective, to draw the reader’s attention to alliteration, assonance and/or sibilance in a literary text under discussion (especially a poem) By all means do this where you feel it will enhance the persuasiveness of your commentary, but avoid doing it on auto-pilot Above all, make sure you guard against being either vague or strained in the way you draw attention

to such effects Here are two unconvincing examples from former student essays:

VAGUE: ‘The poet uses many v and p sounds in order to emphasize their point.’

STRAINED: ‘The appearance of the letter “s” three times in one line and the letter “p” twice shows that the poet is spitting out her anger like a venomous snake.’

If in doubt, avoid making a point about the recurrence of a vowel or consonant; not all such

recurrences are equally expressive or significant

D3 Authors’ Names

The first time you mention an author (including a critic) in an essay, give her or his full published name; in subsequent references to the same writer this can be shortened to just the surname There is no need to put the word ‘critic’ before a critic’s name (as in ‘Critic Helen Vendler

argues…’); this strikes an odd note Also, do not substitute initials for the forenames of authors,

unless their published work is thus identified (as in the cases of T S Eliot or V S Naipaul, for example); this point holds true for the footnotes and bibliography too

D4 Auto-Repeat

Be careful not to re-use a particular word or phrase in a way that seems inert or unduly repetitious

It is easy to develop rhetorical tics, and important to appreciate how over-reliance on certain

phrases can give a static effect to your prose Sometimes words recur from sentence to sentence due to unconscious replay and sometimes the key words of a title can be reiterated too frequently,

as if trotted out by rote Vigilant revising and occasional recourse to a thesaurus should mitigate these problems

D5 Dictionary Definitions

It is, of course, important to consult a dictionary regularly in order to be sure of your understanding and handling of certain words; moreover, there may be times when exploiting the etymology of a term within your essay will help you to further a critical idea However, there are occasions on which wheeling out dictionary definitions can be redundant, creaky and a little wearying for the reader (and, one suspects, for the writer); this can be true, for instance, of an essay introduction that relies on a ‘Before considering X, it is first necessary to define A, B and C’ kind of approach Be discriminating, and don’t just trundle out dictionary definitions as a default essay-writing

mannerism: it can seem dutiful and laborious, rather than resourceful

D6 Different Words, Similar Spellings

The following are pairs of words which are frequently not distinguished correctly Make sure that you know the difference in each case

D7 The First Person Singular Pronoun

There is no law against using ‘I’ in an essay, and there may be occasions on which it will be effective

or necessary However, there are also many occasions on which it works less well It depends on the

context, but to say, for instance, ‘I think’ or ‘I would argue that’ can come across as either emphatic or unduly provisional There might also be a ‘scripted speech’ feel to such moments in an essay, and this can seem somewhat at odds with the remainder of your prose Furthermore, it might strike the reader as unaccountable why certain claims have such phrases attached to them while others do not Consider the following, copied across (with slight revisions) from an old version of

over-the English Undergraduate Handbook:

Students sometimes ask, ‘Can we use the first person in our essays? To what extent do you want

us to express our personal opinions?’ These questions are more complicated than they first seem,

as they involve more than mere stylistic propriety A brief answer to them would go something like this: ‘When you are writing an essay, whether you use “I” or not, you are by default inviting

your reader to share your interpretation of a text You are registering your own impressions of

that text in the hope that your thoughts will, in some sense (although maybe not completely and maybe not immediately) strike a sympathetic chord in your reader’s experience In this, you are tacitly assuming that your reading of the text, while being in one important sense personal and

individual (since no one else can read the poem or play or novel for you), is not merely personal

or idiosyncratic You are not, that is, putting forward your ideas in a defiantly take-it-or-leave-it spirit: “Well, that is what I think the poem is about; I do not, of course, expect you to agree; nor

am I going to be persuaded by you to change my mind, whatever you say, and however good your arguments are.” The implicit “offer” goes more like this: “This is how I read the poem, and these are the features of the text that seem to me to support such a reading Do you agree?”’ In the light of this, you would be advised to restrict your use of such phrases as ‘I think’ or ‘in my opinion’ to those (probably relatively rare) moments in your essay where, either defiantly or tentatively, you realize that you are ‘going out on a limb’ and saying something with which you recognize your readers are not likely to agree immediately You can take it as read that, in one sense, the whole essay is ‘your opinion’, in the ways described above But it is useful to

differentiate between those moments where you think you have a good chance of persuading people and those where (for whatever reason) you think your ideas might meet with some

resistance and/or may be off-target

D8 Gender-Neutral Language

In recent times it has become acceptable (and to many desirable) to challenge the assumption that the notional reader of a text, or else an anonymous author, is male For example, instead of using a masculine pronoun when making generalizations that apply equally to women, such as

‘the reader may find that this contradicts his expectations’, one might choose to say ‘the reader may find that this contradicts his or her expectations’, or ‘the reader may find that this

contradicts her or his expectations’, or ‘readers may find that this contradicts their expectations’ (It is often possible to rewrite the sentence so as to avoid such pronouns altogether.) You may also find some critics alternating, over the course of an essay, between ‘she’ and ‘he’, and ‘him’ and ‘her’, with each successive reference to an anonymous figure; others again deliberately

replace the traditional ‘he’ and ‘him’ with ‘she’ and ‘her’ as a revisionist gesture It is up to you to decide what seems preferable on this matter and to ‘gender’ your language accordingly