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 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 1 CONTENTS Reading English at University 3 Independent Study: A Checklist of Weekly Activities 4 Key Materials for Regular Reference 5 Taking Notes in Seminars and Tutorials 6 Taking Notes in Lectures 6 Taking Notes from Books 6 Giving a Tutorial or Seminar Presentation 7 Planning and Writing Essays 8 Plagiarism, and How to Avoid It 11 THE STYLE GUIDE: Introduction 15 A: Essay Format and Structure 17 B: Punctuation 18 C: Word Order and Word Relations 25 D: Errors, Dangers and Grey Areas 28 E: Quotations 35 F: References and Footnotes 44 G: Bibliography 54 2 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. 3 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, 2 nd edn (Buckingham: Open University Press, 2001). Do not consider this reading as a brief, one- 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.  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 4 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, 8 th edn, 2 vols (New York: Norton, 2006)  Diané Collinson et al, eds, Plain English, 2 nd edn (Buckingham: Open University Press, 2001)  J. A. Cuddon, The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, 4 th 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, 3 rd , rev. edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) 5 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. 6 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… 7 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 notes-to- self and a central quotation (or more than one) attached to each. You need to move from a welter of ideas to a line of thought. This line will partly emerge through composition, but it 8 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 9 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 [...]... 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, 2 which he claims imitates Petrarch’s practice 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,... 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... 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... 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 1 being central to this influence In English sonnet sequences, songs and other forms of lyric can be mixed in with sonnets, while... 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... 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... 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... 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 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... 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 . 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. stephen.james@bristol. ac.uk. Dr Stephen James Senior Lecturer Department of English 1 CONTENTS Reading English at University 3 Independent Study: A Checklist of Weekly Activities. 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, 2 nd edn