Things to be Aware of When Writing Your Essays for ENGL 2030

1. Things to be Aware of When Writing Your Essays for ENGL 2030 ENGL 2030—Summer 2013 | Lavery

2. Things to be Aware of When Writing Your Essays for ENGL 2030 •  A Frag, a CS, or an FS on your essay indicates a Fragment, Comma Splice or Fused Sentence respectively; these are serious grammatical errors which indicate your inability to recognize the nature of a sentence. ENGL 2030—Summer 2013 | Lavery

3. Things to be Aware of When Writing Your Essays for ENGL 2030 • All references to the actions which take place in a work of literature should be in present tense; "Miss Brill puts her fur piece back in its box" not "Miss Brill put her fur piece back in its box." ENGL 2030—Summer 2013 | Lavery

4. Things to be Aware of When Writing Your Essays for ENGL 2030 • Although you may, in my class at least, use first person, you need not say "I think," "I believe," or "In my opinion." ENGL 2030—Summer 2013 | Lavery

5. Things to be Aware of When Writing Your Essays for ENGL 2030 • Do not give me sentences such as this: "Walt Whitman perceived America as well as Americans to be of the greatest people as well as places to write poetry." They give me a migraine. ENGL 2030—Summer 2013 | Lavery

6. Things to be Aware of When Writing Your Essays for ENGL 2030 • Do not throw a quotation into the midst of your essay. Your reader should always be able to tell who the speaker is and what the context of the quotations is. A brief introductory phrase or clause will usually suffice. See the sample essay. ENGL 2030—Summer 2013 | Lavery

7. Things to be Aware of When Writing Your Essays for ENGL 2030 • Documentation. You are not required to uses sources in writing your essays (in fact, I prefer you do not). No need for a works cited page if the only work cited is the poem. If citing a poem, give the line numbers (see the sample essay). ENGL 2030—Summer 2013 | Lavery

8. Things to be Aware of When Writing Your Essays for ENGL 2030 • Don’t refer to writers by their first name. It’s Faulkner and Dickinson, not Bill and Emily. ENGL 2030—Summer 2013 | Lavery

9. Things to be Aware of When Writing Your Essays for ENGL 2030 • In a block quote, or when quoting poetry as poetry, there is no need for q. marks (unless they are in the original). ENGL 2030—Summer 2013 | Lavery

10. Things to be Aware of When Writing Your Essays for ENGL 2030 • In a formal essay do not address the reader as "you": "As you can see." A better choice is to say "As we can see." ENGL 2030—Summer 2013 | Lavery

11. Things to be Aware of When Writing Your Essays for ENGL 2030 • No need for title pages. Just put your name, the name and the date in the upper left-hand corner; your title should be centered. ENGL 2030—Summer 2013 | Lavery

12. Things to be Aware of When Writing Your Essays for ENGL 2030 • One or two lines of poetry are to be incorporated within quotation marks into the text of your prose. When you quote two lines of poetry, be sure to separate the lines by a slash (/) with a space before and after the slash. See sample essay. ENGL 2030—Summer 2013 | Lavery

13. Things to be Aware of When Writing Your Essays for ENGL 2030 • Peter Elbow, writing guru extraordinaire, once compared giving a teacher a paper full of errors (especially errors which might have been corrected by good proofreading) to throwing dirty socks in your mother’s face and saying "wash these." I hate doing laundry. ENGL 2030—Summer 2013 | Lavery

14. Things to be Aware of When Writing Your Essays for ENGL 2030 • Please number your pages. ENGL 2030—Summer 2013 | Lavery

15. Things to be Aware of When Writing Your Essays for ENGL 2030 • Three or more lines of poetry are usually introduced by a colon or a comma and always are set off from your text by beginning a new line, indenting ten spaces from the left-hand margin, and reproducing the lines exactly as they appear in the text (line endings, indentations, spacing, capitals, etc.).   ENGL 2030—Summer 2013 | Lavery

16. Things to be Aware of When Writing Your Essays for ENGL 2030 • Spelling: If you are going to misspell words misspell consistently; do not have "Edgar Allen Poe’ on the first page and "Edger Allan Poe" on the second. Try to avoid third grade spelling errors like "it’s" for the possessive and "its" for the contraction. ENGL 2030—Summer 2013 | Lavery

17. Things to be Aware of When Writing Your Essays for ENGL 2030 • The titles of novels, plays, and feature films are underlined or italicized, while the titles of short stories and poems are placed in quotation marks: Walker’s novel The Color Purple, Spielberg’s film The Color Purple, Shakespeare’s play Othello, Crane’s short story "The Open Boat," Piercy’s poem “Beauty I Would Suffer For." ENGL 2030—Summer 2013 | Lavery

18. Things to be Aware of When Writing Your Essays for ENGL 2030 • To convince your reader that your thesis is valid, you need to support important generalizations and observations with specific examples and quotations from the poem about which you are writing. ENGL 2030—Summer 2013 | Lavery

19. Things to be Aware of When Writing Your Essays for ENGL 2030 • Your title: Your paper must have a title which indicates the subject of your paper. Do not make your title = the title of the work you are writing about. • “After Apple Picking” • is unacceptable. • Aging in Frost’s “After Apple Picking” • is acceptable. ENGL 2030—Summer 2013 | Lavery