Paper Guidelines for Mrs. Miller’s English Classes
LAYOUT AND PRESENTATION:
*Proper title:
Jane McDublin
Mrs. Miller
British Literature, period 2
4 October 2008
Title (do not underline or put into quotation marks)
*Type in 12 pt., Times New Roman font and double space.
*If a quotation contains a word or words in quotation marks, change them from double to single: “the ‘wiggle’ factor”.
*Do not use your conclusion to summarize your argument. If your reader cannot remember the argument of your paper by the time he or she comes to the end of it, something is wrong with the way you have constructed it.
*A paragraph always consists of at least three sentences. On the hand, paragraphs of a full page or longer are silly; aim for paragraphs between one-third and two-thirds of a page in length (assuming 250-300 words per page).
*For matters that are unclear, consult the MLA book you received in ninth grade.
WRITING:
*Do not use first person (I, we, us) or second person (you) and avoid the use of one as much as possible (one must…).
*Do not use contractions. Avoid such informal terms and phrases as kids/guys/a lot/great.
*Avoid the passive voice.
THE LITERARY ESSAY
*Do not retell the story. I’ve read it. (you may provide immediate context for your analysis, however.)
*Underline the titles of book-length works (novels, plays, very long poems, etc.); place titles of shorter works (short poems, essays, etc.) between “quotation marks”.
*Discuss literature as if it were happening now, in the present tense, not in the past tense—and be consistent.
*Unless you have some compelling reason to do otherwise (and you state it in your paper), quote from the text —and, by the way, don’t even attempt to write a literary essay without using plenty of quotations from the work you are discussing. That means that you
can not write an essay from memory; you must always go back and do some re-reading to write an effective essay.
*When you reference the text, place the page number in parentheses and place the period after the reference. For example,
“A man who is injured ought to protest” (9).
*You must identify all of your sources and provide a works cited page if you use a source other than the work we are studying in class.
*Do not rely on spellchecker completely.
*PROOFREAD
*PROOFREAD
*PROOFREAD
No unproofread paper is worth more than a C.