1.  Use a descriptive title for your paper; it should identify the author and/or work and your slant or thesis. Also, provide a heading at the top left of you paper (your name, class, instructor name, and date) and page numbers (with your last name) in the upper right. Use 1.25" margins all around and a readable font (Times Roman is good). Please left justify. Full justification (even right margin) creates uneven spacing and makes the paper hard to read.

2. Before you begin, you might assemble a brief bibliography of the works you plan to cite. A "Works Cited" page at the end is part of even a short paper. It includes only the works you quote from in the paper. Entries of authors are in alphabetic order, in MLA style:

Thoreau, Henry David. The Maine Woods. 1864. Ed. Joseph Moldenhauer. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1972.

---. Walden. 1854. Ed. J. Lyndon Shanly. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1971.

The second entry is by the same author, alphabetized by title. Note where the periods, commas, and colons go. Use postal abbreviations for states, U = University, P = Press.

3.  Use in-text notes instead of footnotes. Try to "set up" (signal phrase) the book title and author in the sentence introducing the quotation; this simplifies everything. As Henry David Thoreau wrote in Walden, "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived" (52). Note the order of end punctuation: quotation mark, parenthesis, page number, parenthesis, and period last. Note also that we use a colon for more formal or complete introductions, a comma or no punctuation if the quotation is an integral part of the sentence structure. 

4.  Once you have introduced a book and author, you can use a short form -- "blah blah blah" (221) -- for all subsequent quotations, unless another new source is introduced. When a new source appears, you must give a full citation (Thoreau 221) or set it up. Every time a new source appears, you must do this. But once you introduce a source and are quoting from it alone continuously, you can simply use page numbers.

5.  Suppose you're quoting from two books by the same author: you still try to set up the quote by announcing the author's name before the quotation, but it might be awkward to give the book title too. So you put that in the parentheses: As Thoreau wrote, "blah, blah, blah, blah" (Maine Woods 221).

6.  Sometimes you can't set up a quotation this well in advance. Then you put all three items, in shortest form, in parentheses: As one scholar noted, "this characterization comes from the Ovid" (Thoreau, Walden, 67). 

7. With electronic sources, you follow the same procedure, only you can't provide page numbers.  Instead, give the paragraph number, if provided, or section number (use "par" and "sec" to abbreviate). If none are given, use no numbers at all, but still indicate that there is a citation for the material you are quoting, even when you use the signal phrase. According to a webpage sponsored by the Children's defense fund, fourteen American children die from gunfire each day ("Child"). 

8.  In addition to setting up the author, try to provide a context for how you're using the quote. And don't overquote without providing analysis in your own words (be sure to interpret and discuss, at length, the quotes you use).

9.  Titles of poems, songs, short stories, and other brief works (when in doubt about "brief," ask yourself if it could be in a collection) are placed in quotation marks. Titles of novels, plays, films and major works are italicized or underlined.

10.  If a quotation runs to more than four lines, it must be blocked and indented. Block quotations are double-spaced and indented ten spaces on the left (but not on the right). You don't add quotation marks to such block quotations, unless they're in the original.  (Note:  because this document is on the web, I'm unable to show a good example here).

11. Use [ ] around references or explanations that you add: "Why would she hang on him [Hamlet's father]." Use an ellipsis to signal an omission from the original. Three for words and phrases; four if a sentence was concluded. Also, if you wish to note than an error is the text's and not your own, us the the latin work sic in brackets.  Here's an example of all three at work:  Jefferson describes looking over the Natural Bridge in the first chapter of Notes:  

You involuntarily fall on your hands and feet, creep to the parapet and peep over it. Looking down from this height about a minute, gave me a violent head ach [sic] [but, when the eyes descend] . . . to the valley below, the sensation becomes delightful in the extreme (32).

12. If you quote someone but you quote them in a source other than the primary text, you must say so. For example, Thoreau wrote in a letter to H.G.O. Blake on August 28, 1857:

13.  Write with strong, active, present tense verbs. For example: I see the theme developing through George and Elizabeth, whom I think stand for George-ness and Elizabeth-ness. Avoid passive verb constructions, such as "The theme that was seen by me . . . "

14.  Chose one point of view and stick to it. I don't care whether you write in the first person (I) or third (the reader) or pretend to omniscience ("Kerouac's sentences have a loose, disjointed quality..."), but be consistent.

15.  Spend much time in revision: For each paragraph, read the first and last sentences: do they present a continuing line of thought? The first is the topic sentence, the last is the transition. If not, then ask: what am I arguing here? how do I know? so what? And revise to satisfy those questions. Be sure that the introduction and conclusion tie together, as a problem posed and resolved, or as a theme announced and completed. Streamline your prose with these steps:

• Make topic and transitional sentences bolder and more direct.
• For every paragraph, add one more piece of evidence.
• Express more of your own views, then back them with evidence.
• Read your prose aloud; condense, simplify, and clarify.
• Print out, set aside for 24 hours. Read aloud once more.
• Spell-check the entire paper. Print and proof-read.
• Revise, spell-check again. Print final copy.

---Remember that you must quote anything that is not your own.---