Formatting
- Coursework should be word-processed using Verdana font, point size 10, and double-spaced.
- Pages should be numbered.
- Include the word-count
Titles
- In the text of your work, titles of books (fiction or critical), plays and long poems should be italicised
- Titles of short stories, short poems, essays and articles in books or journals should be in quotation marks: e.g. ‘The Dead’, ‘Among School Children’, etc.
Quotations
- Quotations of less than four lines should be run into the text of your work, enclosed by single quotation marks: ‘The man spoke’.
- Use double quotation marks for quotations within quotations: ‘He said, “I’m leaving now”, and went’.
- Short verse quotations should have each line separated with a forward slash: ‘My heart is like a singing bird/Whose nest is in a watered shoot’.
- Longer quotations in prose or verse should be set off (indented), and do not require quotation marks. Be sure to quote exactly, even where the text you are copying does not conform to standard grammar, punctuation or presentation.
- Where you need to shorten a quotation or amend the structure to fit in with the grammar of your sentence, use ellipses and square brackets. Compare the examples below:
- ‘Juliet is never extravagant in the way of Romeo, but she, too, undergoes a change’.
- Unlike Romeo, ‘Juliet [was] never extravagant’.
- In writing that ‘Juliet is never extravagant … but… undergoes a change’, A.N. Other overlooks a significant episode.
Make sure that you have retained the original meaning of your quotation. If you ascribe to A.N. Other the quotation that ‘Juliet is … extravagant’, you are committing the academic and sometimes legal offence of misrepresentation.
- Quotations should not be italicised, underlined or otherwise differentiated unless they appear in that form in the original text.
. Word Counts
Your word count includes all quotations, citations, footnotes and endnotes, but excludes the essay title, tables and figures, and the set of references or bibliography at the end. Appendices containing either data or passages used for analysis are also excluded from the word count.
. How to reference your work
ii MHRA – Style-Sheet
- Footnotes or Endnotes
Quotations or citations within a text should be referenced by footnotes or endnotes, recording precisely the source and author of any words you have quoted or ideas you have cited.
The first reference to any text should give full bibliographical details, in the general order of Author, Title (Place name: Publisher, date), p. 111.
Follow the examples below.
Quoting from a text found in a module reader
When quoting from a text made available in a module reader, you should provide as much information about the text as you can (author, title, page, line references etc.), following the information in the module reader. E.g.
“The Tale of Sir Gareth of Orkeney”, in Beginnings of English Module Reader (2014), p. 214, lines 12-20.
A monograph
1 Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland (London: Jonathan Cape, 1995), p. 383.
A chapter in an edited volume
2 Terence Brown, ‘Ireland, Modernism and the 1930s’, in Modernism and Ireland: The Poetry of the 1930s, ed. by Patricia Coughlan and Alex Davis (Cork: Cork University Press, 1995), pp. 36-7.
An article in a journal
3 Fredric Jameson, ‘On Magic Realism in Film’, Critical Inquiry, 12:2 (1986), 301-25 (pp. 302-3). [Note that the page span of the journal article is given without the p. or pp. abbreviations, whilst the specific pages being referred still use p. or pp.]
Something quoted by another writer
4 Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), p. 36; quoted in John McClure, Late Imperial Romance (London: Verso, 1994), p. 41.
For later references to a work already cited, give the minimum information necessary to locate it, usually the author’s surname, short title, and page number:
5 Kiberd, Inventing Ireland, p. 68.[Note that format of title follows the first reference.]
If you know how to use ibid. and op. cit., do so if you wish. If you are not sure, do not. In any case, the short-title system given above is often easier to follow.
NB. Endnotes or footnotes start with the author’s name in normal format (A. N. Other); entries in your bibliography (see below) start with the author’s name in reverse order (Surname, First-name).
- Quotations from Plays
Where a play text contains line numbers, footnote references should be given in the form:
William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. by Harold Jenkins (London: Methuen, 1982), I.2. 45-7.
Where a play text does not contain line numbers, footnote references should give page numbers:
Brian Friel, Dancing at Lughnasa (London: Faber and Faber, 1990), p. 24.
Bibliography
The bibliography is an essential part of every literary essay you submit. Every text you have read should be listed, even if you have read nothing other than a single primary text. Follow the examples below, noting that the author’s surname is the first element in each item. The list should be in alphabetical order according to the following relevant layouts. Pay careful attention to the order of elements, punctuation and formatting such as italics:
A monograph
Foster, John Wilson, Fictions of the Irish Literary Revival (New York: Syracuse University Press, 1987).
An edited volume
Ellmann, Richard, ed., The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969).
A volume edited by two people
Williams, Patrick and Laura Chrisman, eds., Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994). [Use the names in the order in which they appear on the title page.]
A new edition of an old work, edited and re-published
Corelli, Marie, The Sorrows of Satan, ed. by Peter Keating (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).
A modern re-issue (not a new edition) of an old work
Joyce, James, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 1916 (London: Paladin, 1988). [Note the original date of publication, and its placement.]
A book published in more than one edition
Gibaldi, Joseph, MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, 7th edn (New York: MLA, 2009).
[You should always specify the edition you have used.]
A chapter in an edited volume
Brown, E.K., ‘E.M. Forster and the Contemplative Novel’, in E.M. Forster: The Critical Heritage, ed. by Philip Gardner (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), pp. 369-78.
An article in a journal
Jameson, Fredric, ‘On Magic Realism in Film’, Critical Inquiry, 12:2 (1986), 301-25. [In this example, the journal volume number is 12, and the issue number is 2, but not all journals have issue numbers.]
An electronic publication
Treadwell, James, ‘The Legibility of Liber Amoris’, Romanticism On the Net 17 (February 2000) <http://users.ox.ac.uk/~scat0385/ 17liber.html> [accessed 23 August 2000] [Note the inclusion of the date you read the article – because net resources may be often changed or relocated – as well as the date of the article itself.]
An e-reader
Brontë, Charlotte, Jane Eyre (London: Service and Paton, 1897), eBook, Amazon Kindle, Chapter 3.
