1. Author’s Names and Characters’ Names.

Some basic dos and don’ts for the literary analysis:

Here are a few conventions you’re expected to know for writing college essays in English courses. These are, for the most part, also conventions for many forms of public writing.

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1. Author’s Names and Characters’ Names.

–First Cite, Full Name: As a general rule, when you refer to an author (or indeed any person) in a paper, you should use the full name the first time you refer to him or her; after that, you can use just his or her last name. Indeed, whether you’re writing about literature or not, this rule applies generally: first cite, full name; after that, last name only is fine.

–In writing about literary characters, follow your author’s lead. That is, if your author refers to a character as “Billie,” generally you can too. Try to be sure, of course, that you differentiate characters clearly. For instance, you can refer to Charley Wales” as “Wales,” as long as you refer to his daughter “Honoria Wales” as “Honoria.” (In fact, it’s customary to refer to children by their first names.)

Be aware that the simplest of departures from these conventions can be misunderstood as an attempt on your part to be sarcastic (e.g. call a person by his or her first name, and it could sound condescending; use only a title, like “The Senator,” and it sounds like you’re making fun of him or her. Call a woman only by her first name, and that can seem sexist).

2. Abbreviations. Generally, abbreviations are to be avoided in college essays, with the exception of the titles you see before and after proper names (for example, “Dr.” or “M.D.”), names of familiar organizations (“N.A.A.C.P.,” “F.B.I.”), or conventions noting time or dates (B.C. or A.M.)–not, however, for months (that is, don’t use “Jan.” for “January”). “Etc.” is never used, since the entire question is–what’s left in etc.? (For some of those organizations, as well, you can omit the periods (e.g. just “FBI”).

3. When using numbers, spell out any number that takes only one or two words (e.g. “thirty-eight”). The general exceptions are for dates, addresses, times of day, or instances where numbers are used for technical measurement or identification (e.g. “Flight 800”).

4. Learn the rules about underlining, italics and quotation marks. When I use the code “ITAL” in the margin of your paper, it means that you’ve violated a rule about italicizing. As a good rule of thumb, anything that can hold within it shorter selections or elements is underlined or put in italics. Underline or italicize, then, the titles of books, magazines, newspapers, television series (like Starter Wife). Italics or underlining are interchangeable: it print, that is, sometimes underlining appears as italics or the other way around. Meanwhile, those shorter selections–poems, articles, chapters, specific TV episodes that can appear inside things that are underlined–should be presented inside double quotation marks (” “). No need to put quotation marks around your own title, or around indented passages. The only time indented passages have quotation marks around them is if you’re citing dialogue

5. Where to place puncutuation marks in relation to each other? In general, the most important dimension of this rule is whether or not you’re citing page numbers. That is, when you’re not citing page numbers, always put periods and commas inside quotation marks; put colons and semicolons outside them; put question marks inside the quotes if you’re quoting a question, outside if you’re turning a statement into a question yourself. But when you are citing page numbers, put the page number citation, which normally appears in parenthesis, afteryour quotation mark and then with closing punctuation. So, for instance, you might write: Didion calls her ideal “self-respect” (27); here she means not submitting to the “demands of others” (27).

6. NO QUOTES MORE THAN TWO LINES!

7. Verb tenses are tricky when writing about literature. The basic rule is: You should use the past tense when discussing historical events, while you should use the literary present when discussing fictional events.Literary works, paintings, films, and other artistic creations are assumed to exist in an eternal present.

8. Punctuating passages is also tricky. Many students become confused by the fact that works of fiction often introduce a piece of dialogue with a comma–thus, “Bounderby replied, ‘I never have.'” But when writing your own prose, the fact is that you usually use a colon where that comma appears.

As a general rule, you should feel comfortable in punctuating an author’s passage as if it were your own prose, in any given sentence. Thus you can omit a comma, a question mark, and so on if the meaning of your own sentence doesn’t need it. However, you should use brackets to indicate any substantive change you make to a passage you’re quoting inside your quotation marks. For instance, if you take a capital letter and make it small case, you would do as follows: By the end of the text, however, he calls Bounderby “[d]eflated.” You can do this, in other words, if the word was capitalized as “Deflated” in the original.”