The Literary Paper: more suggestions
Everyone. Some people are having problems with using the quoted references from the novel. Here are some more suggestions for success with this paper (and the same suggestions apply to the research paper).
1) Go back again and look at the first set of suggestions: The Literary Paper: Suggestions for Success.
2) Review the student literary papers, looking carefully at how these students use quoted references. Note the use of quotes from the text for both short quotes and long quotes. You will most likely be using both in your literary paper and your research paper. Remember that long quotes, longer than three lines in the original, do not use quotation marks but are indented instead [you can use an indent of five spaces on each side or an indent of ten spaces on the left side of the quote].
Look at how in the first student literary paper, “What Do You Really See?”, uses a long quote that is set off with indentation in the first paragraph. Look at how the page reference is cited. Now look at the use of short quotes in the second paragraph (the one that starts with “In order to see…”). Notice that a sentence that contains a quote must still be a complete, grammatically correct sentence. This is important. Your sentences must still be your sentences. And because they are your sentences, you should use only enough quoted material to make your point; otherwise, the author’s language will overwhelm yours.
3) Don’t use my review as a model. I wrote that review for a specific publication that did not especially want a “MLA” type review.
4) Study the Purdue OWL [Online Writing Lab] quotation exercises. Then take the OWL quotation self-test. Then check your answers.
5)
The literary paper is a pre-view of how to do the research paper, at
least as far as using quoted references is concerned. It is essential that you
show that you know the standard way of using quoted references before you hand
in the rough draft of your research paper. It is not possible to pass this
course without demonstrating that you know the approved, standard way of using
quoted references.