Cardiff School of English, Communication, and Philosophy

(ENCAP)

English Literature

Style Guide
Style Guide for all BA, MA and PhD students in
English Literature, Cultural Criticism, Critical and
Cultural Theory, and Creative Writing.

2013–14
 CONTENTS

1. ACADEMIC ENGLISH ......................................................................................................... 3

2 PLAGIARISM ....................................................................................................................... 4

3 REFERENCING YOUR SOURCES ..................................................................................... 5

4 PRESENTATION OF WRITTEN WORK ............................................................................. 5

4.1 General layout ............................................................................................................... 5
4.2 Quotations and quotation marks ................................................................................... 5
4.3 How to handle references when quoting from critics or drawing on their ideas ........... 7
4.4 How to give references when quoting from literary texts.............................................. 8
4.5 Book titles.................................................................................................................... 10
4.6 Articles or essays in books ......................................................................................... 11
4.7 Articles in journals ....................................................................................................... 12
4.8 Newspapers ................................................................................................................ 12
4.9 Other small details ...................................................................................................... 13
4.10 Quoting from a critic who is quoting from another critic ......................................... 14
4.11 Kindles and other E-Books ..................................................................................... 14
4.12 The Web .................................................................................................................. 15
4.13 Referencing films, television programmes, and works of art .................................. 15
4.14 Bibliography............................................................................................................. 17
4.15 Example of a bibliography ....................................................................................... 18
5. AVOIDING COMMON ERRORS ....................................................................................... 19

APPENDIX 1: Essay Checklist ................................................................................................. 23

APPENDIX 2: ENCAP References and Bibliographies Guide .............................................. 24

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1. ACADEMIC ENGLISH

All written work must be presented in a clear, readable form, and in accordance with recognised
academic conventions. You must acknowledge the sources of your ideas, give proper references
for your quotations from texts and also give a bibliography at the end of your essay. These are all
very simple conventions and quickly learnt.

Different systems of referencing are used by different publishers and in different academic
disciplines. This Style Guide sets out the conventions taught in the BA English Literature degree
at Cardiff; these are based on the MHRA Style Guide: A Handbook for Authors, Editors, and
Writers of Theses (2nd edition, 2008) and should be sufficient to enable you to produce a piece
of assessed work free from errors of presentation. For anything which is not covered in this Style
Guide you should consult the full MHRA Style Guide, which can be downloaded for free from the
web at http://www.mhra.org.uk/.

The Board of Studies for English Literature has, however, agreed that students may use
alternative referencing conventions, provided that they are used consistently. If, for example, you
are a joint honours student and your other subject uses a different set of conventions from that
outlined in this document, you are free to use those conventions in your work for English
Literature. An appendix to this Style Guide sets out the basics of the two most commonly used
ways of referencing which you will encounter in published research: the system set out in more
detail in the main part of this Guide, and the Harvard or author-date system. Do not, however,
mix or confuse the two systems.

Essays should be double-spaced, using indented paragraphs and an unjustified (ragged) right-
hand margin (as in this Guide). This Guide uses an extra line of space between paragraphs in
order to make clear the points and details in the examples. Do not, however, use an extra line of
space in this way in your essays or assessed work. Indented quotations and footnotes should be
single-spaced. Do not use italics or bold for your quotations but present them as they are in the
text you are citing.

Before you hand in your work, check the spelling and grammar, as well as the accuracy of all
names and references. Poor spelling, punctuation and grammar will be penalised. Loose sheets
can get lost, so submit your essay in a 'punched pocket' wallet and number each page. You
might wish to get your dissertation bound; the Library offers a service for this at a small charge.
Postgraduate students may need to consult tutors about specialist areas of referencing
(manuscripts, for example) and may need to refer to manuals such as The Oxford Guide to Style
(Oxford University Press, 2002).

The notes that follow cover most of the points you will come across, but the basics are
straightforward and will take you a long way towards achieving good professional standards in
your writing:

 Put the following titles in italics: titles of novels, plays, critical works, collections
of poems, journals, films, paintings and newspapers.

 Put titles of single poems and essays in single inverted commas (not italics).

 Indent all quotations longer than three lines; in such cases omit quotation marks.

 Give full details for your first reference only; after that, for all critical works use
just surname and abbreviated title with page number in the notes; for literary texts
(only), give page or line or act numbers in the body of the essay.

 Put surnames first in your bibliography, but not in the notes.

Remember: all quotations and borrowed ideas must be referenced so as to avoid

accusations of plagiarism.

2 PLAGIARISM

Plagiarism is the use of the ideas or words of others without acknowledging them as such. It is
an academic tradition that the ideas and words of another are not used without
acknowledgement. You must adhere to this rule. Furthermore, the mark for written work in part
indicates your understanding of the material of the essay. If you have merely repeated the words
of another, it is difficult to assess your understanding, and so to award a mark. It is, therefore,
totally unacceptable for you to plagiarise in your written work. If you do so, your mark will be
affected, and you will also have committed an unfair examination practice.

You may, of course, make use of the ideas of others. However, each use of the ideas or words of
another must be individually acknowledged in your footnotes or endnotes. Whenever you owe an
idea to someone else, you should make this clear through your references (although this does
not apply to ideas derived from lectures and seminars).

All assessed work must be submitted electronically through Learning Central as well as in hard
copy (see Appendix 2 below). The TURNITIN program on Learning Central identifies all material
in an essay that is copied from another source. TURNITIN is extremely effective in enabling
examiners to identify plagiarism in assessed work.
3 REFERENCING YOUR SOURCES

As noted above, you need to give references for the sources of your essay (the critical books and
articles you may have read), both when you quote from them and when you paraphrase ideas
from them. You also need to give references for all your quotations from the primary texts you
are using.

There are two main systems for this: either footnotes, which appear at the bottom of the page, or
endnotes, which appear at the end of the essay before the bibliography. Footnotes are preferred:
do not use a mix of footnotes and endnotes. Footnotes should be single spaced. (Some word
processors automatically use a smaller font size for notes, but this is not essential.) Use Arabic
(1, 2, 3) numbering, not Roman (i. ii. iii). Numbers in the text should be inserted using

superscript, usually at the end of the sentence, thus.4 Notice that the numbers come after the
punctuation, not before.

4 PRESENTATION OF WRITTEN WORK

4.1 General layout

 The essay must be typed or word-processed on one side only of A4 paper.
 The essay must be double spaced except for indented quotations and footnotes.
 Use a 12pt Times New Roman font (or a 12pt sans serif font such as Arial).
 The left margin should be one inch or 2.5cm. A wider right-hand margin (4cm) will allow
more space for marginal comments to be made by the examiners.
 The first line of each paragraph should be indented (except the first paragraph of the essay,
or a major subdivision within the essay or chapter). Use tabs to indent.
 Do not put extra space between paragraphs.
 Do not justify the right-hand margin.
 Do not use bold. If you want to emphasise something, use italics.
 Page numbers should be printed at the top right-hand corner.

In exams you should double-space your writing (i.e. write on alternate lines of the exam booklet):
this makes it easier for the examiner to read.

4.2 Quotations and quotation marks

Use single quotation marks from the beginning of the essay and stick to this throughout, except
when you need quotation marks inside existing quotation marks, as in the following instance:
 According to Terence Hawkes, 'The pun of "love" with which King Lear begins [...] has a
crucial function in the play.'1 It is not, however, the only pun in the play.

The full stop here goes inside the quotation mark because the quotation forms a complete
sentence and is separated from the preceding passage by a punctuation mark (the comma after
'Hawkes').

Quotations are treated in one of two ways. A short quotation (up to two lines) is best included in
your sentence in quotation marks. (If you are quoting, say, a line and a half of verse, then you
should indicate where the line-end occurs with a slash (/). So, for example: 'Experience, though
noon autoritee / Were in this world’).

If the quotation is a longer than two lines, then it should be presented in the following form:
introduce the quotation with a colon [:] at the end of your text (unless the syntax of the quotation
continues uninterruptedly that of your essay, in which case a colon is not used). Then begin the
quotation on a new line and indent the whole quotation by one tab space from the right-hand
margin to distinguish it clearly from the surrounding text.

Indented quotations should not be enclosed within inverted commas: only use inverted commas
in an indented quotation if part (but not the whole) of the quotation is direct speech. Quotations of
verse must be set out exactly as in the original. If you wish to omit part of a quotation from the
middle, then first check that what is left makes continuous sense as it stands. Indicate the
omission with an ellipsis, that is, three spaced full stops [. . .]. This does not apply to words
omitted from the beginning or end of a quotation where there is no need to use an ellipsis. It is
almost always wrong to continue a sentence around a long quotation. Begin a new sentence on
a new line after an indented quotation and (unless starting a new paragraph) place it at the left-
hand margin.

Two invented examples show how this works. Example 1 is from the middle of an essay on Jane
Austen; example 2 is from the start of an essay on poetry:

Example 1

The crucial stage of Fanny Price's maturation comes when she refuses to accept the
advice that she marry Henry Crawford. She must contend with the assumptions that all those
around her share. They believe that, because she is 'the perfect model of a woman' (p. 344), she

1. Terence Hawkes, William Shakespeare 'King Lear' (Plymouth: Northcote House, 1995), p. 53.
[Note here that when a title appears within another title, the subsidiary title requires inverted
commas.]
will see it as her feminine duty 'to accept such an unexceptionable offer' (p. 331). She herself,
however, is put in a state of turmoil:
Her mind was all disorder. The past […] was terrible. But her uncle's anger gave her the
severest pain of all. Selfish and ungrateful to have appeared so to him! She was
miserable for ever. (p. 320)

It is the pressure of obligation with which she contends. Its result is to make her mind 'all
disorder'.

Example 2

The power of poetry to fix and immortalise a love relationship is commonly asserted.
Shakespeare proudly asserts, 'Not marble nor the gilded monuments / Of princes shall outlive
this powerful rhyme' (Sonnet 55, ll. 1-2). Donne takes a more playful, but not less confident line
in 'The Canonization':
And if unfit for tombs and hearse
Our legend be, it will be fit for verse;
And if no piece of chronicle we prove,
We'll build in sonnets pretty rooms;
As well a well wrought urn becomes
The greatest ashes, as half-acre tombs
And by these hymns, all shall approve
Us canonized for love.
(ll. 29-36)
Donne's wit here takes hold of the concept of the divine nature of love and plays with its
relationship to poetry.

In this example, the ll. is an abbreviation of the word 'lines'; the single l. is the abbreviation for
'line'. By analogy, pp. stands for 'pages', while p. stands for 'page'. Do not use ‘pg.’

4.3 How to handle references when quoting from critics or drawing on their ideas

Use footnotes to provide references to critics. The number should appear at the end of the
quotation or allusion. More often than not, this will be at the end of a sentence:

As Stephen Greenblatt points out, Shakespeare’s life does not make exciting reading.2 This,
however, is not the case with Marlowe.

As you will see from the footnotes at the bottom of these pages, titles of books, plays and novels
are given in italics, whereas titles of essays (or short stories or poems), which represent an
extract from a book, are given in quotation marks.

2
The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard and
Katharine Eisaman Maus (New York and London: Norton, 1997), p. 46.
The first footnote or endnote reference to any book should include the full publication details:

3. Catherine Belsey, John Milton: Language, Gender, Power (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988),
p. 53.

Subsequent references to the same book should be given in the shortest intelligible form.
Normally this is the author's surname and a shortened form of the title of the book, followed by
the page reference, thus a subsequent reference to the book just referred to would be:

4. Belsey, Milton, p. 60.

In your reading you will sometimes find that as an alternative to repeating the name or title some
critics use the abbreviation Ibid. (Ibid. means 'the same' in Latin) for immediately following
references to the book or article cited in the note before (for example, 4. Ibid., p. 60, would refer
to Belsey, page 60), or Op. cit. (meaning 'in the work already cited') to indicate that it is a work
referred to earlier rather than the work referred to immediately above (for example, 4. Greenblatt,
op. cit., p. 40). Such Latin abbreviations, however, can be confusing for the reader and are best
avoided: use instead the system of author surname and abbreviated title for every reference after
the first one.

4.4 How to give references when quoting from literary texts

The system for quoting from literary texts is exactly the same as quoting from critics. However, a
string of footnote or endnote references to the same novel or poem or play should be avoided by
stating after the first full citation: 'All further references are to this edition and are given the text.'
This procedure is reserved only for the literary texts you are discussing: do not use it for referring
to critics (an exception would be when writing a critical theory essay where a critical text might be
the primary text you are discussing). For a sequence of references to a critic, use the short form
of reference, as explained in the previous section of this Guide.

Once you have stated that further references are given in the text, you simply include the line or
page numbers in parentheses after the quotation (for example, ll. 1-6 for a poem; pp. 12-15 for a
novel; IV.i.64-6, for a play), as explained below:
Novels
Let us assume you are writing an essay on Toni Morrison's Tar Baby. For your first quotation
from the text you put a number for the note: 'He believed he was safe.'5 Then, either at the
bottom of the page in a footnote, or at the end of the essay in an endnote, you put the following:

5. Toni Morrison, Tar Baby (London: Triad Grafton Books, 1983), p. 1. All further references
are to this edition and are given parenthetically in the text.

This means that when you quote further extracts from the novel in your essay, you can just give
a page reference in brackets in the body of the essay after the quotation. In other words you do
not need to repeat all the information in a footnote or endnote.

If you are referring to several different primary texts, make sure the reader knows which text you
are referring to. For example, in an essay on Lawrence, you might be writing about both Sons
and Lovers and Women in Love. Follow the advice above about footnoting, but in the text of your
essay you may have to include the titles of the works you are discussing as well as the page
reference:

If Miriam is ‘stunned by [Paul’s] cruelty’ (Sons, p. 274), Ursula seems to be constantly afraid
of Gerald’s ‘frightening, impending figure’ (Women, p. 467).

Plays
For plays, follow the same system. If you are writing about Hamlet, for example, you might quote
from one of his soliloquies:

To be, or not to be - that is the question;

Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles.6

As with the novels and poetry, the first reference has to be given in full:

6. William Shakespeare, Hamlet, III.i.56-9, in William Shakespeare: The Complete Works,

ed. Peter Alexander (London and Glasgow: Collins, 1951). All further references are to this
edition and are given parenthetically in the body of the essay.

Subsequent references can be included in the body of your essay:

Hamlet delays and delays, uncertain whether ‘To be, or not to be’ (III.i.56) a revenger.

For modern plays give page numbers instead of act, scene and line numbers.
One of the purposes of saying in your note that all references are from a certain edition is that it
saves a lot of unnecessary repetition. Be careful, however. If you are discussing two texts or two
editions of the same play, make sure the reader knows which you are quoting from. If it is at all
unclear, use a footnote or endnote.

Poems
As with novels and plays, when you are referring to a poem the first reference should include full
bibliographical information in a footnote and subsequent references may be given
parenthetically. For example, you might be writing about Sylvia Plath. Following your first
quotation (here just a few words) from the text you put a number for the note: 'Stasis in
darkness.'7 Then, either at the bottom of the page in a footnote, or at the end of the essay in an
endnote, you put the following:

7. Sylvia Plath, 'Ariel', in The Norton Anthology of Poetry, 4th edn, ed. Margaret Fergusson,
Mary Jo Salter and Jon Stallworthy (New York: Norton, 1970), p. 1734, l. 1. All further
references to Plath's poems are to this edition and are given parenthetically in the body of
the essay.

This means that, when you quote further lines from the anthology, you can just give a line
reference in brackets in the body of the essay after the quotation; so, for example, you might go
on to quote the line 'Then the substanceless blue' (l. 2). Here, (l. 2) tells the reader this is line

two. If in your essay you then go on to quote from another poem, such as 'Lady Lazarus',8 then
you should insert a new note number after the first quotation (or after the title of the poem) and
locate the poem for the reader, as follows:

8. 'Lady Lazarus', in The Norton Anthology, p. 1735.

As ever, the important thing is that the reference is clear and helpful to the reader.

4.5 Book titles

In word-processed assessed work titles of books should be in italics (this distinguishes, for
example, Hamlet the character from Hamlet the play). In a hand-written exam paper, titles of
books, plays and novels should be underlined. To a printer or editor, underlining means 'use
italics here'. Do not mix italics and underlining.

The first reference should be given in full, as in the following example:

9. Tom McArthur, Worlds of Reference: Lexicography, Learning and Language from the Clay
Tablet to the Computer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 59.
Notice the order and the punctuation:

Author, title in italics or underlined (place of publication: name of publisher, date of

publication), page number you are citing.

The date of publication is the date of the edition you are using rather than the original date of
publication. But the original date should also be given in square brackets before the date of the
edition you are using if it supplies important information relevant to your argument. The place of
publication should be the town or city of publication, not the country (not, e.g., USA).

As explained above, subsequent references to the same book should be given in the notes in the
shortest intelligible form. Normally this is the author's surname, a shortened from of the title of
the book, followed by the page reference. So, a further reference to the book in note 9 would be:

10. McArthur, Worlds of Reference, p. 60.

Note the following, where the author's name is part of the title:

11. Emily Dickinson: Selected Letters, ed. Thomas H. Johnson, 2nd edn (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), pp. 194-7.

[MA here is the abbreviation for Massachusetts, to avoid confusion with Cambridge in England.
The inclusion of ‘2nd edn’ tells the reader which edition has been cited.]

Titles of short poems and articles from journals or collections of essays are conventionally given
within inverted commas. So you would write Wordsworth's The Prelude, but Wordsworth's 'Hart-
Leap Well'. In dealing with Chaucer it is normal to underline (or italicise) individual tales - for
example, Nun's Priest's Tale - as well as the whole work, Canterbury Tales.

4.6 Articles or essays in books

The first reference should be given in full, as in the following example:
12. Martin Elsky, 'Words, Things, and Names: Jonson's Poetry and Philosophical Grammar',
in Classic and Cavalier Essays on Jonson and the Sons of Ben, ed. Claude J. Summers and
Ted-Larry Pebworth (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1982), pp. 31-55 (p. 41).

Notice the order and the punctuation:

 Author, title of article in single quotation marks, 'in' followed by title of book in italics or
underlined, 'ed.' followed by editor's name (place of publication: name of publisher, date of
publication), first and last page numbers of the article (page number you are citing).

Subsequent references to the same essay can be given in the shortest intelligible form. Normally
this is the author's name and a shortened form of the title, followed by the page reference, thus a
further reference to the essay in note 12 would be:

13. Elsky, ‘Words, Things, and Names’, p. 43.

4.7 Articles in journals

The first reference should be given in full, as in the following example:

14. J. D. Spikes, 'The Jacobean History Play and the Myth of the Elect Nation', Renaissance
Drama, 8 (1970), 117-49 (p. 120).

Notice the order and the punctuation:

Author, title of article in single quotation marks, title of journal in italics or underlined, volume
number (year of publication), first and last page numbers of the article [not preceded by 'pp.']
(page number you are citing).

If a journal has parts to each issue or volume this may be indicated as: volume number, full stop,
part number: e.g. 19.3 (meaning volume 19, part 3):

Carl Phelpstead, ‘Size Matters: Penile Problems in Sagas of Icelanders’, Exemplaria, 19.3
(2007), 420–37.

Subsequent references to an article that has been referenced in full on its first use should be
given in the shortest intelligible form. Normally this is the author's surname and a shortened form
of the title, followed by the page reference. So a further reference to the article in note 14 would
be:

15. Spikes, ‘The Jacobean History Play’, p. 120.

4.8 Newspapers
Articles in newspapers or magazines require only the date of issue (day, month, and year) and
the page numbers:
 16. Michael Schmidt, 'Tragedy of Three Star-Crossed Lovers', Daily Telegraph, 1 February
1990, p. 14.

4.9 Other small details

There are all kinds of small details that make up references. You may, for example, need to refer
to a particular volume of a multi-volume book:

17. Lord Broughton, Reflections on a Long Life (London: Macmillan, 1909), II. 70.

If there is a volume number for a book, it should be given in large roman numerals, and p. or pp.
should be omitted. If there are three units - volume, part, page - the sequence should be large
Roman, small Roman, Arabic (I. ix. 21).

If the edition used is other than the first, this should be stated as follows:

18. D. G. James, The Romantic Comedy, 2nd edn (London: Longman, 1963), p. 6

Similarly, if a book was originally published abroad, it may be appropriate to indicate this in the
parentheses:

19. Kathleen Williams, Jonathan Swift and the Age of Compromise (Kansas City, l958;
London: Longman, 1959), p. 40.

In most traditional styles of presentation, the editor's name follows the title of a work, which itself
counts as the author's name, so:

20. Robert Henryson: Poems, ed. Charles Elliott, 2nd edn (London: Longman, 1967), p. 97.

There is, however, no objection to the following variation:

21. Charles Elliott (ed.), Robert Henryson: Poems, 2nd edn (London: Longman, 1967), p. 97.

Where there are two editors, use either 'ed.' (meaning edited by) or, when using the second
style, 'eds' (meaning editors).

The following example has several features:

22. Linda Bamber, 'History, Tragedy, Gender', in Shakespeare's History Plays: 'Richard II' to
'Henry V', ed. Graham Holderness (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992), pp. 64-73.
Notice here that the titles of the plays is put in inverted commas because the main title of the
book is italicized and the title needs to tell the reader that the book is about the plays Richard II
and Henry V, not the characters of those names.

Notice that for references to journals we do not employ the abbreviation p. or pp. for the main
page numbers, only for any particular page reference:

23. Helene Keyssar, 'The Dramas of Caryl Churchill: the Politics of Possibility',
Massachusetts Review, 24 (1983), 198-216 (p. 201).

The title of a journal need not be given in full if there is a recognised abbreviation (e.g. JEGP;
PMLA).

4.10 Quoting from a critic who is quoting from another critic

Be careful to attribute quotations to their correct author. For example, on page 23 of their
Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory, 2nd edn (Hemel Hempstead: Prentice Hall,
1999), Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle quote a passage from Roland Barthes's 'The Death
of the Author', including the sentence:

The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.24

If you wanted to quote this sentence in your essay, you should attribute it to Barthes, not to
Bennett and Royle, thus:

24. Roland Barthes, 'The Death of the Author', quoted in Andrew Bennett and Nicholas
Royle, An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory, 2nd edn (Hemel Hempstead:
Prentice Hall, 1999), p. 23.

This tells your reader where you got the quotation from. Research students should always go
back to the primary source for all quotations - in this case, Barthes' essay - in order to avoid
repeating any errors that may have crept into the secondary source.

4.11 Kindles and other E-Books

Many primary texts and critical works are now available as e-books for Kindles or other e-book
readers. Providing references to such editions can be problematic as they may not provide page
numbers, or the page numbers may change according to the font size, screen ratio etc. Here is
some advice on how to refer to e-book editions.
Firstly, a word of warning. Many very cheap Kindle and other e-book editions are completely
unedited and may consist of nothing more than a plain text version of an out-of-copyright text:
such editions can be highly inaccurate and will not provide explanatory notes or a critical
introduction; although they may be cheap, this is a false economy. If you choose to use an e-
book edition rather than a printed edition you should use a proper scholarly edition, just as you
would when choosing a print edition. For example, many Penguin Classics and Oxford World’s
Classics editions are available for the Kindle.

Increasingly, Kindle e-books do have fixed page numbers which appear if you open the 'Menu'
while on the page. Otherwise they use 'locations', but these may vary from device to device. If
the e-edition you are using does not have fixed page numbers, then provide the most precise
reference you can, such as a chapter number or section title or number.

In your bibliography a Kindle edition of a text that has also been published in print may be
referred to in the following way:
Austen, Jane, Pride and Prejudice (New York: Penguin Classics, 2007), Kindle edition.

Another accepted way of referring to e-book editions is to include the type of e-book version you
used (e.g. Kindle version or Adobe Digital Editions version) and to include the book’s DOI (Digital
Object Identifier, a unique code used to identify digital outputs) or where you downloaded the e-
book from (if there is no DOI or you cannot trace it). For example:
Austen, Jane, Pride and Prejudice (2007). Kindle edition. Retrieved from Amazon.com on
17/8/12.

4.12 The Web

Internet references should include the web address (underlined), author of text and/or web
designer, and date of access in square brackets:

25. Martin Coyle, 'Attacking the Cult-Historicists', Renaissance Forum, 1.1 (1996). Available
at http://www.hull.ac.uk/renforum [accessed 17 December 2001].
26. Brent Cunningham, 'The World Sees News through New York Eyes', Columbia
Journalism Review, March/April 2001. Available at
http://www.cjr.org/year/01//1/cunninghm.asp [accessed 1 September 2005].

4.13 Referencing films, television programmes, and works of art

Titles of films, television series, and works of art should be italicised (or underlined, if in an
exam), like book titles:

Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest was released in cinemas one year before Psycho.
 HBO’s television series The Wire is set in Baltimore.
Edward Hopper painted Nighthawks in 1947.

Titles of individual episodes of a television series, however, should be placed within inverted
commas.

This scene can be found in an episode of The Wire entitled ‘Time After Time’.

On the first occasion (and only the first occasion) that you refer to a film, painting, or television
programme in your essay, you should provide a footnote/endnote giving information about the
date, director (for films), distributor (for films), channel (for television programmes only), and
location (for artworks). Note carefully the examples below:

27. The Company of Wolves, dir. Neil Jordan (RKO, 1984).

28. ‘Time After Time’, episode of The Wire, first broadcast on HBO, 19 September 2004.

29. Newsnight, BBC2, 2 May 2013.

30. Edward Hopper, Nighthawks (1947), The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago.

If you cannot find the precise date of first transmission for a television programme, you can
simply give the year. If you are not sure about a film’s distributor, imdb.com can often help.

If you are quoting from a film or a television programme in your essay, it is very important that
you transcribe quotations accurately, but you do not need to provide the time from, say, the DVD.
As long as it is clear which film or programme you are taking dialogue from, you can simply give
the quotation in the main body of your essay without an accompanying footnote or parenthetical
time reference.

If you are analysing a scene in a film or television programme, but not actually quoting any
dialogue from the scene, you can simply describe the scene; again, there is no need to provide a
timing.

You may wish to include images (film or television stills, reproductions of paintings, and so on) in
your essay. There are essentially two ways of doing this. You can either include an image on the
page of the essay where you analyse it, or you can have all of the images as appendices at the
end of the essay, and then refer to them as Appendix 1, Appendix 2, and so on, in the main body
of the essay. Appendices should go after the bibliography. It does not matter which system you
choose, but be consistent. There is no need to provide detailed information beneath an image --
this will be given in your bibliography and notes -- but including the title of the
film/artwork/programme is a good idea.

Films, television programmes, and artworks should be listed under Primary Texts in your
bibliography. Use a subheading (or subheadings, if necessary) to separate such texts from
written texts, and order alphabetically by title, including the same information as for the first
reference to each item in your footnotes (see above).

4.14 Bibliography

A sample bibliography is given below in section 4.15 below.

All essays must end with a bibliography listing all the works you have consulted in the
process of preparing the essay. This includes the edition of the principal text(s), even if it is the
standard edition prescribed for the course. The bibliography should also include books and
articles you actually quote from even if they are already listed in your footnotes or endnotes.

You should divide your bibliography into Primary Texts (i.e. all the literary texts regardless of
whether they are the main subject of your essay, and, as noted above, any films and paintings,
using a subheading to separate them from other texts) and Secondary Sources (i.e. the critical
books and articles). If you draw on the Introduction of an edition of a text but do not use the text
itself, list it under Secondary Sources, treating the Introduction as an essay:

Barron, W. J. R., 'Introduction', in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, ed. W. J. R. Barron
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1974)

Finally, at the end of the Bibliography you should list any Internet or Web Sources you have
used.

Start the Bibliography on a new page. Within each section, list the items in alphabetical order,
putting the author's surname first (in a bibliography in list form, final full stops should not be used;
notice the indent after the first line):

Miller, J. Hillis, 'Narrative and History', English Literary History, 41 (1974), 455-73
Thompson, Ann, 'Are There Any Women in King Lear?', in The Matter of Difference:
Materialist Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare, ed. Valerie Wayne (New York and London:
Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), pp. 117-28
 Woolf, Virginia, Jacob's Room, ed. Kate Flint (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992)

Where there two or more authors of a book, the style to follow is:

Bennett, Andrew, and Nicholas Royle, Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory, 2nd
edn (Hemel Hempstead: Prentice Hall, 1999)

Bibliographies are important to the reader. The details you give enable the reader to place a
book or article in the history of scholarly or critical debate, but also to see what sources you have
used. In an unseen examination, you will not, of course, be expected to provide full references or
a bibliography in the manner outlined above.

It is often important to include the original date of a text in your essay. Sometimes this can be
done in the main body of your essay or chapter but it is often useful to include such details in the
bibliography:

Allen, E., A Knack to Know a Knave (London, 1594; facs edn, Oxford: Malone Society
Reprints, 1963)

4.15 Example of a bibliography

This section provides a short specimen bibliography using some of the examples cited above.

Bibliography
Primary Texts [i.e. literary or other works]
Allen, E., A Knack to Know a Knave (London, 1594; facs edn, Oxford: Malone Society Reprints,
1963)
Austen, Jane, Pride and Prejudice (2007). Kindle edition. Retrieved from Amazon.com on
17/8/12.
Woolf, Virginia, Jacob's Room, ed. Kate Flint (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992)

Films
The Company of Wolves, dir. Neil Jordan (RKO, 1984)

Paintings
Edward Hopper, Nighthawks (1947), The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago.

Secondary Sources [i.e. criticism]

Barron, W. J. R., 'Introduction', in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, ed. W. J. R. Barron
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1974)
Bennett, Andrew, and Nicholas Royle, An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory, 2nd
edn (Hemel Hempstead: Prentice Hall, 1999)
Miller, J. Hillis, 'Narrative and History', English Literary History, 41 (1974), 455-73
Thompson, Ann, 'Are There Any Women in King Lear?', in The Matter of Difference: Materialist
Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare, ed. Valerie Wayne (New York and London: Harvester
Wheatsheaf, 1991), pp. 117-28

Internet Sources and Websites

Coyle, Martin, 'Attacking the Cult-Historicists', Renaissance Forum, 1.1 (1996). Available at
http://www.hull.ac.uk/renforum [accessed 17 December 2009].
Cunningham, Brent, 'The World Sees News through New York Eyes', Columbia Journalism
Review, March/April 2001. Available at http://www.cjr.org/year/01//1/cunninghm.asp
[accessed 1 September 2010].

5. AVOIDING COMMON ERRORS

Nobody expects you to get everything right all the time. As a student of English, however, you
are expected to care about what you write and how you write. Spelling, punctuation and grammar
matter because they help us to be precise, to be interesting and to be professional. But they also
help us to enjoy the very simple pleasure of being able to make language work for us and to
enjoy other people's writing. Students’ work, however, can often be spoilt by simple errors that
undermine confidence in the argument of the essay and that make the difference between a
lower mark and a good grade. If you find you are making the errors below, you should do all you
can to try to correct them.

The possessive
Look closely at the following examples:

his hers its whose

The form it's means 'it is' or 'it has'; the form who's means 'who is' or 'who has'. You should
avoid contractions of this kind in academic writing: write ‘it is’ and ‘who is’ / ‘who was’ instead.
Similarly, you should avoid forms like ‘can’t’, ‘don’t’, ‘won’t’ in academic English: write ‘cannot’,
‘does not’, ‘will not’.

The apostrophe
Apostrophes come after the person(s) or thing(s) in possession of the object or person:
 Charles Dickens's novels;
Keats's odes
the novels of Charlotte and Emily Brontë: the Brontës' novels.

Apostrophes do not make words plural:

dramas, families, potatoes, the Brontës.

It's
There is no such word as the following: its'.
Avoid writing 'it's', meaning 'it is', in academic work: write 'it is' instead.

Comma splices
Complete sentences cannot be joined with a comma: this is known as a comma splice. A
particularly common error is to join two sentences with a comma and the word 'however'. This is
incorrect and the following is therefore wrong:
Dickens shows this happening several times, however, the main effect is one of comedy.
[WRONG]

Rewrite either as:

Dickens shows this happening several times. The main effect, however, is one of comedy.

or as:

Dickens shows this happening several times; the main effect, however, is one of comedy.

You can join sentences by 'and', 'but', 'yet', 'neither', 'nor', but not by 'however'.

The semi-colon
The semi-colon can usually be replaced by a full stop; it is used where we have two sentences
together that are considering similar matter. The only other place you find a semi-colon is when it
is used to divide sets of items after a colon where the reader might get confused: it might be a
series of small sentences like these; it might be a group of lists; it might be sets of similar things.
Make sure that you really understand the different uses of the colon and the semi-colon.

Quotations
Avoid dropping quotations into the middle of sentences:
 It is clear that Owen is on the side of the ordinary soldier, 'Move him gently into the sun'
('Futility'), and against the generals. [WRONG]

Rewrite as:

It is clear in 'Futility', for example, that Owen is on the side of the ordinary soldier as he
speaks of moving the wounded man 'gently into the sun' (l. 1), and against the generals.

If you have doubts about your punctuation, get a book, and follow it. R. L. Trask, The Penguin
Guide to Punctuation (London: Penguin, 1997) is clear and simple. If you want to improve your
command of English, The Student's Guide to Writing by John Peck and Martin Coyle
(Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1998) is readable, brief and informative. A basic grammar book is
Marion Field's Improve Your Punctuation and Grammar (Oxford: How To Books, 2000).

Abbreviations
Commonly used abbreviations are as follows: e.g. = for example; i.e. = that is; cf. = compare; ff.
= following (pages or numbers); f. = the following page or number. (Note the full stops.) You
should not use abbreviations as part of your continuous text; you may use them very
occasionally in your footnotes.

Common spelling errors

You should always be aiming to increase your vocabulary; use a dictionary to check spelling of
words that are new to you, especially those you have only heard and not seen in print. It is a
good idea to have a dictionary by your side whenever you are working so that you can
immediately check spellings and meanings. Remember that you are permitted to take a
dictionary into all English Literature examinations.

Also remember to be particularly careful to check the spelling of the titles, authors and names of
the characters in the texts you are writing about (e.g. The Waste Land - three words - not The
Wasteland; Heathcliff, not Heathcliffe; Grendel, not Grendal). Carelessness in this area does not
impress examiners.

Here is a list of the correct (UK English) spellings of words which are frequently misspelt:

accommodation archetypal archetype argument commitment committed

corollary definite embarrass epistolary epitome exaggerate
existence fallible foresight fulfil fulfilled harass
harassment hierarchical hierarchy independent infinite inimical
irrelevant knowledgeable metonymy occur occurred occurrence
parallel patriarchal patriarchy pseudonymous relevant responsible
rhythm rigorous separate skilful soliloquy soliloquies
symbolic synonymous threshold truly wilful withhold

Make a special point of checking ance/ence, ent/ant, able/ible endings and ei/ie combinations.

The words in the following pairs are often confused. Make sure you know the difference by
checking them in your dictionary:
disinterested/uninterested enormity/enormousness infer/imply
discrete/discreet stationary/stationery affect/effect
dependant/dependent practice/practise simple/simplistic
complimentary/complementary site/sight/cite lose/loose
there/their where/wear

Centuries: when referring to centuries use a hyphen to form the compound adjective. No hyphen
is needed for a noun. (It is an eighteenth-century novel. It was published in the eighteenth
century.) Do not use an apostrophe before abbreviated decades: the 1960s, not the 1960’s.
****
 APPENDIX 1: Essay Checklist

Here are some questions to ask yourself while writing an essay. A negative, or unsure, answer to
any of these questions means that you should revise and polish your essay further.

Structure:
What is the main argument (thesis) of my essay?
Have I made sure to organize my essay around the development and support of this argument
rather than the presentation of observations or topics?
Does the one main argument in each paragraph reinforce/develop my paper’s central argument?
Is there a clear logic behind the way in which I have organized my paragraphs to follow each
other?
Have I given equal weight to the texts I discuss? If not, have I justified why not?
Have I eliminated any arguments that might be interesting but that don’t relate to my thesis or the
main argument of my paragraph?
Does my conclusion effectively encapsulate and reinforce the significance of my overall
argument?

Style and Grammar:

Does each sentence follow naturally and logically from the preceding one?
Have I made sure that each sentence is a coherent whole and not trying to do too much?
Have I been clear, concise and direct in my phrasing?
If I use words like ‘consequently,’ ‘although,’ and ‘however,’ do these words make sense in the
context in which I’ve presented them?
Have I avoided cliché and generalization and figurative language?
Have I avoided subjective statements? Have I avoided unnecessary, wordy and vague
language?
Have I re-read my sentences to make sure that it is very clear who or what is performing the
action in those sentences?
Am I sure that I know the meaning of all the terms I use?

References/Citations:
Have I fully acknowledged all of my sources?
Do my quotations help to prove my point? Have I indicated how they do so? Have I made sure to
explain the significance of my quotations?
Do my quotations make grammatical sense in the context of my own sentence?
Is it clear who is speaking and in what context?
Have I checked the Style Guide to make sure that I am using the appropriate style conventions?
Have I double-checked quotations to make sure that they are accurate?
APPENDIX 2: ENCAP References and Bibliographies Guide
 Cardiff School of English, Communication and Philosophy
(ENCAP)

References and Bibliographies

A Short Guide

For all students

Please contact the administrative Staff if you require this Guide in an

alternative format, e.g. alternative font, coloured paper, etc. You will find an
electronic version of this Guide on the School web site at
http://www.cf.ac.uk/encap/.

(Version 1 - August 2013)

26

The purpose of this short guide is to explain the referencing conventions in the two main
styles used within the School. For more detailed descriptions of these styles and of all the
conventions governing academic style for essays, dissertations and projects in your areas
please consult the Style Guides produced by the Board of Studies.

English Literature and Cultural Criticism adopt the MHRA Style. The full MHRA Style
Guide can be downloaded for free from the web at http://www.mhra.org.uk/.

English Language adopts the ‘Harvard Style’. A very extensive guide to the Harvard System
can be found at http://libweb.anglia.ac.uk/referencing/harvard.htm .

Philosophy allows you to choose either of the two styles but requires that you use one
consistently in an essay or dissertation.

You can find videos and tutorials on how to use both these systems at:
http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/insrv/educationandtraining/guides/citingreferences/. Please
consult them when you prepare your written work.
 27

MHRA
The first reference to a work should be given in full and thereafter abbreviated to the shortest
intelligible form.

Examples of first reference

Books
Tom McArthur, Worlds of Reference: Lexicography, Learning and Language from the Clay
Tablet to the Computer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 59.

Emily Dickinson: Selected Letters, ed. Thomas H. Johnson, 2nd edn (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1985), pp. 194-7.
[NM: Here the author is part of the title]

Books in Translation
Jean Starobinski, Montaigne in Motion, trans. by Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1986), p. 174.

Edited Books
Approaches to Teaching Voltaire’s ‘Candide’, ed. by R. Waldinger (New York: Modern
Language Association of America, 1987), pp. 3, 10, 27.

Book Sections/Chapters in Edited Collections

Martin Elsky, 'Words, Things, and Names: Jonson's Poetry and Philosophical Grammar', in
Classic and Cavalier Essays on Jonson and the Sons of Ben, ed. Claude J. Summers and
Ted-Larry Pebworth (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1982), pp. 31-55 (p. 41).

Articles in Journals
J. D. Spikes, 'The Jacobean History Play and the Myth of the Elect Nation', Renaissance
Drama, n.s. 8 (1970), 117-49 (p. 120).

Articles in Newspapers or Magazines

Jonathan Friedland, ‘Across the Divide’, Guardian, 15 January 2002, section G2, pp. 10–11.

Theses and Dissertations

R. J. Ingram, ‘Historical Drama in Great Britain from 1935 to the Present’ (unpublished
doctoral thesis, University of London, Birkbeck College, 1988), p. 17.

Online articles
Els Jongeneel, ‘Art and Divine Order in the Divina Commedia’, Literature and Theology, 21
(2007), 131-45 <http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/litthe/frm008>

Richard Lee, ‘The Rebirth of Inherited Memories’, MHRA Working Papers in the Humanities,
4 (2009), 18-24 <http://www.mhra.org.uk/ojs/index.php/wph/article/viewFile/73/70 >
[accessed 1 May 2012]

Kindle Editions and Electronic Books

Nicolas Jacobs, Early Welsh Gnomic and Nature Poetry (London: Modern Humanities
Research Association, 2012), p. 10. Google ebook.

Austen, Jane, Pride and Prejudice (New York: Penguin Classics, 2007), Kindle edition.
28

Online Encyclopedias or databases

Kent Bach, ‘Performatives’, in Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy
<http://www.rep.routledge.com> [accessed 3 October 2001]

Blog Entry
Stephen Andrew Hiltner, ‘On Press with “The Paris Review”’,
<http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2012/03/01/on-press-with-the-parisreview/>
[accessed 3 March 2012]

Film
The Company of Wolves, dir. Neil Jordan (RKO, 1984)

Paintings
Augustus Leopold Egg, Past and Present (1858), Tate Britain, London

Bibliography

Starting on a new page after the text and after any endnotes, list the items in alphabetical
order, putting the author's surname first (in a bibliography in list form, final full stops should
not be used; notice the indent after the first line):

Miller, J. Hillis, 'Narrative and History', English Literary History, 41 (1974), 455-73
Thompson, Ann, 'Are There Any Women in King Lear?', in The Matter of Difference:
Materialist Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare, ed. Valerie Wayne (New York and
London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), pp. 117-28
Woolf, Virginia, Jacob's Room, ed. Kate Flint (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992)
 29

Harvard System
The Harvard System is also known as the author-date system. It refers to any of a family of
styles, each known as a ‘house style’. What is detailed here is one such style (see
http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/insrv/resources/guides/inf057.pdf). Some module leaders might ask for
a specific house style. In such instances, please consult the relevant module guide.

In-text References to the work of others

When you refer to a published author’s words or ideas in your work, insert at an appropriate
point in the text the author’s surname, the year of publication, and- if appropriate- the
relevant page numbers in round brackets (Alternatively, if the author’s name is included in
the sentence only provide the year of publication and- if appropriate- the page number in
brackets). The same system is adopted in subsequent references to the same author or
work.

It has been argued (Harris 2001, pp. 20-21) that the main considerations…..

 For edited books that contain collections of chapters written by different authors, cite
the author of the chapter and not the editor of the overall book.

 If you are citing different publications written by the same author in the same year,
label the first one cited with the letter ‘a’ after the year and the second ‘b’ etc. e.g.
(Smith 2004a), (Smith 2004b). You will need to do the same in your list of references.

 Where two authors have produced the work, include both their last names in your
citation e.g. (Cullingworth and Nadin 2007) or Cullingworth and Nadin (2007).

 When there are three or more authors use the abbreviation et al. (and others) after
the first author’s surname e.g. Tayler et al. (2003) or (Tayler et al. 2003).

 If you are discussing a point about which several authors have expressed similar
views, include them all in one set of brackets in chronological order of publication. List
any works published in the same year in alphabetical order e.g. (Midgley 1994; Smith
1994; UNCHS 1996; Gandelsonas 2002).

If you are using an eReader version of a book which does not include page numbers, use the
chapter and then paragraph numbers

It has been argued (Smith 2007, chapter 2, para. 4) that the main considerations…

References or Bibliography
Provide at the end of the work (after any endnotes) a full description of each source referred
to in the text as a bibliography or list of references.

Write the list in alphabetical order: if there are more than two authors, use the
abbreviation et al. after the first author’s name. Arrange any references with the same author
by the year of publication, beginning with the oldest.

Titles should be italicised for books, reports and conference proceedings. For journal
articles, the title of the journal (not the title of the journal article) should be printed in italics.
30

Books
Abel, R. 2004. The eye care revolution: prevent and reverse common vision problems. New
York: Kensington Books.

Journal Articles
Ang, L. and Taylor, B. 2005. Managing customer profitability using portfolio matrices. Journal
of Database Marketing and Customer Strategy Management 12(5), pp. 298-304.

Book Sections/Chapters in Edited Collections

Ballinger, A. and Clark, M. 2001. Nutrition, appetite control and disease. In: Payne-James, J.
et al. eds. Artificial nutrition support in clinical practice. 2nd ed. London: Greenwich Medical,
pp. 225-239.

Newspaper Articles
Benoit, B. 2007. G8 faces impasse on global warming. Financial Times 29 May 2007, p. 9.

Reports
European Commission. 2004. First report on the implementation of the internal market
strategy 2003-2006. Luxembourg: Office for Official Publications of the European
Communities.

Conference Papers
Fledelius, H.C. 2000. Myopia and significant visual impairment: global aspects. In: Lin, L.L.-
K. et al. eds. Myopia Updates II: Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Myopia.
Taipei, 17-20 November, 1998. Tokyo: Springer, pp. 31-37.

PhD Theses
Garcia-Sierra, A. 2000. An investigation into electronic commerce potential of small to
medium-sized enterprises. PhD Thesis, Cardiff University.

Electronic Journal Articles

Merchant, A.T. 2007. Diet, physical activity, and adiposity in children in poor and rich
neighbourhoods: a cross-sectional comparison. Nutrition Journal [Online] 6. Available at:
http://www.nutritionj.com/content/pdf/1475-2891-6-1.pdf [Accessed: 10 May 2007].

Webpages
Thompson, B. 2006. Why the net should stay neutral [Online]. Available at:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4594498 [Accessed: 10 May 2007].

Blogs
Bradley, P. 2010. Top 100 tools for learning 2010. Phil Bradley's web log [Online] 12 June
2010. Available at: http://www.philbradley.typepad.com/ [Accessed: 18 June 2010].

DVD/Videos
Super size me. 2005. Directed by Morgan Spurlock [DVD]. London: Tartan Video.

Electronic Books
Roubini, N. and Mihm, S. 2011.Crisis economics: a crash course in the future of finance
[Kindle version]. London: Penguin. Available at: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Crisis-Economics-
Course-Finance-ebook/dp/B004Y4WMHW/ref=sr_1_7?s=digital-
text&ie=UTF8&qid=1317896488&sr=1-7 [Accessed: 6 October 2011].

For a full guide on references visit: https://ilrb.cf.ac.uk/citingreferences/tutorial/faq.html#top