- Avoid the five-paragraph essay structure.
- Assume that your reader is familiar with the text but is not a part of our class, so don’t refer to the class.
- Wherever possible, avoid using the pronouns “I,” “we,” and especially “you.”
- Wherever possible write in the present tense when writing about literary works and film.
- Underline or italicize the title of a full-length work, whether it’s a book, a journal, a newspaper, a CD, etc.; put the title of a shorter work that is part of a longer work in quotation marks, whether it is a story, a poem, an article, a song, etc. (e.g. Othello but “The Tale of the Hunchback”). But don’t underline or italicize the title of your own essay.
- When citing a Shakespeare play, it is convention to do so by act, scene, and line number (e.g.I.iii.38-41). Unless you use blocked quotations, in which case quotations should appear as they do in the text, separate lines of speech with slashes. [e.g. As Othello says, “My parts, my title, and my perfect soul / Shall manifest me rightly” (I.ii.31-32).]
- Quotations of longer than four lines should be blocked off from the rest of your text by single- spacing and indenting them
- 5 sources required are in the files