Wednesday, May 3, 2006

• Exam review
• Course evaluations

Notes

I have a few general comments about your drafts, which overall were very good or showed promise.

Take the following advice to heart and apply it to the best of your ability. And above all else, read your paper aloud before you turn it in on the thirteenth! (This allows you to defamiliarize yourself with your own writing — something silent reading never does.) You’ll notice the little things, as well as major structural issues.

• You should eliminate “It is [insert noun here] who/that” phrases from your writing. Such writing relegates the main idea to a relative clause and removes any action from your writing.
• Avoid passive voice. Instead of “Duncan is murdered by Macbeth,”" write “Macbeth murders Duncan.” (Remember that politicians and other stereotypically “sleazy” people love the passive voice because it deflects agency. “Mistakes were made in New Orleans” avoids culpability; “We made mistakes in New Orleans” accepts blame — and is more honest.)
• Make sure that you’re not using “to be” verbs excessively — they only communicate existence, when most literary writing entails (and necessitates) action. For example, do you use a verb like “is deceiving”? Make sure that you can’t use “deceives” instead. (Sometimes “to be” is unavoidable, so don’t get too militant about addressing this issue. Use discretion.)
• Play, book, and journal titles should be italicized (e.g., Richard III or Renaissance Self-Fashioning); journal articles and other short works should be surrounded by quotation marks (e.g., “The Household of Archbishop Parker and the Influencing of Public Opinion”).
• Quotations that are longer than 3 lines of poetry or prose need to be offset by one inch from the left margin (keep line-breaks in the poetry); the parenthetical citation follows the concluding punctuation mark — with no period after it.
• In-line quotations of poetry need to have lines separated by a slash mark: “Nothing she does or seems / But smacks of something greater than herself, / Too noble for this place” (WT 4.4.157–59). This format of parenthetical citation applies for in-line quotations of prose, as well.
• Regarding the citation of Shakespeare’s plays, please cite by act, scene, and line number, as I demonstrate in citing the above quote from The Winter’s Tale.

Let me know if you have any questions or concerns regarding the essay or this draft.