ENG 1720/2770 Documenting Fiction and Poetry Dr. Berman
For each exam, there should be a heading that looks like this:
Richard Student
ENG 2770
Date
An Analysis of Beauty in Barbery’s The Elegance of the Hedgehog
Be sure to document titles properly. Short story titles are placed within quotation marks. Titles of novels are italicized or underlined—not both. You can title your exams, Exam I or Final Exam. Do not italicize or place quotation marks around your own title. Only published works titles can be italicized, etc. Oh yes, you must double space the entire paper.
Documenting fiction using MLA style (Modern Language Association) is rather easy when one is not doing any research. All that needs to be documented are quotations. So, if you are quoting a passage from a story or a novel or a play, the format is always the same. If you are citing just one work, you don’t even need to use a Works Cited page. For two or more works, however, you do. If you are discussing just one work in your paper, all you need to do is present the author’s last name and page number in parentheses. Since you have probably mentioned the author’s name in your essay somewhere, I am really only interested in the page number. Here’s how to cite a quotation—three lines or less–from a story, novel, or play.
“I was weeding the garden when nanotech came to my town” (Kress 7).
Note the punctuation. Be sure to be consistent when presenting the punctuation for a short quote.
For a research assignment, you would have to Google MLA style for details. I will provide more information on doing research and how to document it in that assignment. Again, if you have already mentioned the author’s name, you can omit it from the parentheses. If you are presenting dialogue, then two sets of quotation marks are necessary.
“’I love it here,’ he said” (Bisson 29).
For quotes that exceed three lines the entire quote needs to be blocked or indented and quotation marks can be eliminated. If there is dialogue, just copy the page as is. Blocked quotes cannot exceed eight lines. Oh yes, and like the rest of your paper it should be double spaced. Here’s an example of a blocked quote without dialogue:
Cliff’s fountain pen rolled across the pull-out writing shelf and he sighed
and grabbed it before it tumbled to the floor. The small ink bottle kept
marching down the shelf too, juddering with each vibration of the car. (Dozois
107)
Note that the end punctuation is a little different for the blocked quote than for the short quote. Also, as indicated, quotes should also be double spaced. Do not single space quotes. MLA stopped doing that in 2003.
Scroll down for information on how to document poetry (ENG 1720). For this class, if you are using a Kindle or another e-device for you novel, a page number is ot required.
Documenting Poetry
Since poetry is a unique genre, it has a unique way of being documented in MLA Style. Essentially, the writer of a paper on poetry, when quoting a poem, has to indicate where the poetic lines begin and end. So, the poem may appear one way when it’s published, but the writer who interprets the poem may present the poem another way. However, the way a poem originally appears on the page needs to be indicated.
For example, a poem may appear on a page this way, the way it was written:
A bird came down the walk,
He did not know I saw—-
He bit an Angleworm in half,
And at the fellow—raw!
A writer of a paper, however, may quote the lines, but note that he or she indicates the original form with slashes:
Emily Dickinson presents a unique image when she writes, “A
Bird came down the Walk,/He did not know I saw–/He bit an
Angleworm in half,/And ate the Fellow, raw” (1-4).
Note too that the writer of the paper indicated (within parentheses) the line numbers of the quoted lines. Finally, the text from which the lines are quoted should be indicated on the Works Cited page at the end of the paper. If the lines are presented by the student in the same way they are presented by the poet, slashes are not necessary. Use this format for the formal analysis assignment.
When documenting a quote from a play, simply present the page nu ber of the play.
