Writing About Literature a Few Friendly Reminders

WRITING ABOUT LITERATURE—A FEW FRIENDLY REMINDERS

·  Adhere to the convention of using the present tense when writing about literature. This will help you avoid getting tied up in knots trying to differentiate among time periods in various parts of a work. Thus, Hamlet is startled to see his father’s ghost; later, he confronts his mother with the ugliness of her sin.

·  Quote is a verb; quotation is a noun.

·  Refer to a work of literature as a novel only if it is one. Medea, for example, is a play.

·  Be careful with pronouns and their antecedents. If the noun referent is, say, child, or one, the pronoun that follows it should not be they. Such words as anyone, no one, someone, person are singular and call for singular references. You can sometimes avoid this problem by using the plural: people instead of person; readers rather than reader.

·  Beware the dangling modifier. This is sometimes the unfortunate result of a noble effort to vary sentence structure. Here’s a classic—if gender-stereotypical—example that will help you avoid this problem: As a mother of three with a fourth on the way, my washing machine is always running.

·  Avoid the passive voice.

·  Omit needless words. Shun redundancy.[Vow to eradicate such throat-clearing phrases as my personal opinion (besides, aren’t all opinions personal?), at the present time, the basic essentials, connect together, due to the fact that, until such time as…]

·  Words or terms commonly associated with conversational diction—lifestyle, laid-back, she was “there for him”—have no place in academic writing.

·  If you’ve forgotten, relearn the correct use of the apostrophe. Everyone should have long since learned the difference between it’s and its.

·  Avoid the pet peeves of nitpicking English teachers: loose/lose, affect/effect, less/fewer, who/that, data/datum, who/whom…

·  Favor muscular verbs over ‘to be’ verbs whenever possible. This keeps your writing strong and relatively free of flowery adjectives and adverbs. [Thus: Replace It is the combination of these two elements that makes the argument weak. with The combination of these two elements weakens the argument.]

·  Proofread! Many of us find it difficult to catch our own errors, but as a general rule, AP students should not be committing any of the mistakes noted above. Read each paragraph aloud to ensure that it flows smoothly, makes sense, and does not contain any mistakes.