Grammar

Students often tell me that they hate grammar, and I expect that most of us hardly relish the idea of studying it. On the other hand, I know that from a teacher’s point of view grammar mistakes usually indicate sloppiness. A student who is careless with grammar is usually careless in other areas of his or her writing. Turning in a paper with a large number of grammar mistakes in a writing class is analogous to turning in a drawing with crooked lines in an architecture class because you were too lazy to use a ruler. In a professional setting, people expect you to communicate in Standard English. If you do not, they usually decide that you are stupid, uneducated, or lazy, and will not consider your ideas no matter how creative they are. Consequently, I will weigh grammar mistakes against your grade for assignments in this class.

The following are some common mistakes and some items that I find particularly unacceptable:

  • The essay should be typed double-spaced on 8 1/2 x 11 white paper, with one-inch margins on top and bottom and 1 or 1.25 inch margins on the sides.
  • You should use a normal typeface (Times, Courier, Arial Helvetica) and it should be dark enough to read without problems. Do not use other fonts unless there are very clear and pressing reasons to do so.
  • Your name, my name, the course, and the date should be single spaced and placed in the upper left-hand corner of the first page.
  • Your paper should have a carefully considered and useful title.
  • All pages after the first page should be numbered in the upper right-hand corner.
  • The paper should be stapled at the upper left-hand corner.
  • Do not underline, italicize, nor put in quotes the title of your essay.
  • In papers for my course, you may use the first person unless I explicitly tell you otherwise.
  • Be sure you properly italicize the title of books or movies and put quotation marks around titles of essays or poems. Don’t confuse italics with quotation marks.
  • Do not put an empty space (an additional line break) between paragraphs.
  • Use the present tense in talking about the content of literary texts or analytic essays. (For example: “Frow states [not stated] that it was Wordsworth himself who encouraged tourism in the Lake District.”)
  • If you use quotations be sure they are exact and integrated smoothly into the text. Additionally, they should be properly punctuated.
  • Make sure your subject and object agree in number. A common mistake is to use the plural “their” rather than “his or her.” (For example: “Each student brought his or her own [not their own] book.”)
  • Do not use the phrase “today’s society.” It is redundant.
  • Where possible, be economical in your wording

Quotation Guidelines

In your writing, I expect you to use quotations from the essays and stories we read. The quotations serve as expert testimony and as material for analysis, comparison, and response.

  1. Do not use quotations for more than a fourth of your paper.
  2. You must cite your sources. If you get something from online, site the online source. For how to site online sources, see the Modern Language Association’s at Look under Style then FAQ.
  3. Use quotations to support what you have to say about a text. Avoid retelling the story: all quotations should be used as evidence in relation to the topic you are discussing.
  4. Choose a quotation if it says something distinctive, if it is difficult to paraphrase, if it is especially important to your thesis, and/or if it is open to interpretation. Use a paraphrase (putting a quotation in your own words) or summary (a condensed version of the main points, in your own words) if the quotation doesn’t meet these criteria.
  5. Use the present tense when quoting from an essay, story, or poem. You may remove words from a passage by using ellipsis (. . . ). Please note that in ellipsis there is a space between each period. If you skip a whole sentence, use four periods but if you only skip a section of a sentence, use three.
  6. For quotations within a quotation, use single quotation marks. For example: Farrington explains Descartes breakthrough: “Descartes doubted all things until he could not doubt his own doubting. Thus his phrase ‘Cogito ergo sum’” (12).
  7. Keep long quotations to a minimum. Quotations longer than four lines should be set off from your main text by a one inch indentation (block format).
  8. Work quotations smoothly into your own writing. They must make grammatical and logical sense when joined to your prose. All quotations must be a part of a larger sentence. Do not do this: Blake shatters stereotypes of the individual. “Those who dare appropriate to themselves Universal Attributes/ Are the Blaphemous Selfhoods & must be broken asunder (Jerusalem 90:32-33).
  9. Document your sources in MLA format: give line numbers for poems and page numbers for stories, novels, and essays in parentheses after the quotation marks, but before the period (e.g. Davis says, “Los Angeles has become a fortress” (75). You may include the author’s last name either in your sentence or with the page number in parentheses. Please note that you do not use “p.” in citing page numbers. Also note that the period for the end of the sentence follows after the closed parenthesis.

Examples of acceptable quotation use and documentation:

a. “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” says Dickens (1).

b. For Dickens, the eighteenth century was “the best of time” and “the worst of times” (1).

c. The eighteenth century was “the best of time” and “the worst of times” (Dickens 1).

d. “Alph, the sacred river,” Coleridge writes, “ran/ Through caverns measureless to man/ Down to the sunless sea” (3-4).

e. At the beginning of “Kubla Khan” Coleridge sets up an opposition between the limits of man-made and the limitelessness of nature:

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

A stately pleasure dome decree:

Where Alph, the sacred river, ran

Through caverns measureless to man

Down to the sunless sea. (1-5)

The caverns defy man’s desire to measure them while humans limit nature in the dome.