Observations concerning essays
1. Punctuation of titles.
Short stories are in “quotation marks.”
Novels are italicized.
“Sonny’s Blues”
The Road
2. When citing novels use author and page #
For example:
(McCarthy 14) not (page 14), (p. 14), (pp. 14), (pg. 14) etc.
Subsequent citations need only the page number:
(14)
3. Citation placement
The tale opens with a gruesome explanation of how the father kills, skins, and bruises the "rat like" (43) bodies of the foxes.
BETTER:
The tale opens with a gruesome explanation of how the father kills, skins, and bruises the "rat like" bodies of the foxes (43).
Here we get the quote directly next to the noun it is describing without interrupting the flow of the sentence.
4. Don’t use a quote where you’ve changed most of it!
He tells the girl, “[I am] in love [with you]” (33).
You’ve edited the whole thing! Better to choose a different quote or alter the sentence construction that to use this.
5. Quotes and quotes within quotes.
When you are quoting a simple line of dialogue, it is still just a single quote.
INCORRECT:
Replying to this request, the narrator confesses, ""The truth is, cathedrals don't mean anything to me. Nothing. Cathedrals. They're something to look at on late night TV.""
That's just a single quote.
Even when the father insults her at the end of the story by saying, "'She's only a girl'"(432), she resigns herself to the fact that he might be right.
CORRECT:
Replying to this request, the narrator confesses, "The truth is, cathedrals don't mean anything to me. Nothing. Cathedrals. They're something to look at at on late night TV" (12).
Even when the father insults her at the end of the story by saying, "She's only a girl"(32), she resigns herself to the fact that he might be right.
Here's where you actually have a quote within a quote:
June May, reflecting on her ability to communicate, says, "I try to think of all the Cantonese words I can say to her, stuff I learned from friends in Chinatown, but all I can think of are swear words, terms for body functions, and short phrases like 'tastes good, tastes like garbage, and she's really ugly'"(209).
In The Road McCarthy breaks several grammatical conventions, including a refusal to use quotation marks when his characters speak.
You should use normal quotations when embedding lines from the story to indicate quotation. If you have a quote within a quote, you do not need to insert non-existent quotation marks. (This doesn’t happen in the novel anyway.) We’ll look at examples of this tomorrow.