Check List for Essays
Refer to The Little, Brown Handbook for style of presentation.
- Titles
- Do NOT underline your own title.
- DO underline (or italicize) the titles of complete, long works, like novels or, in our case, plays.
- Remember that your title should inform your reader of which text you are discussing; don’t make it so general that it could be about anything, or so broad that it could be the title of a series of volumes. In other words, something like “Henry IV’s Anxieties” rather than “The Problems of Kingship.”
- Thesis statement: what is your main idea? What are you arguing to prove?
- Try to end your introduction with the thesis statement. Try to use a complex sentence to give yourself room to develop complicated ideas.
- A thesis statement is not a question or a vague generalization or an announcement of the way you plan to organize the paper.
- Citing evidence from Shakespeare’s text
- Study the way the introduction in the Signet edition uses quotations.
- Quote sparingly; find the most suggestive or interesting words and phrases to make your point.
- Give act, scene, and line in Arabic numerals parenthetically after a short quotation, with the final punctuation coming after the parenthesis: “Come on and kiss me, Kate” (5.2.180).
- Longer quotations (three lines or verse or more) should be indented 10 spaces and single-spaced. You do not use quotation marks in this case, because the indentation indicates that you are quoting. Put the act, scene, and line numbers to the right of or underneath a passage quoted in this style. Look at the way this is done in the essays in the Signet editions.
- Documentation: review section on ACADEMIC HONESTY in the syllabus
