10-step Format Instructions with thanks to Prof. Karen Ford, English Dept.

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• 1. Type the essay with one-inch margins all around.

• 2. Do not use a title page.

• 3. Type name, date, and course title, single-spaced, on the first page in the upper right-hand corner. Center the title. Do not indent the first paragraph, but indent the beginning of each subsequent paragraph without skipping any extra lines. Line-skipping is important for the Web, since indentation doesn't work. But for printed material, line-skipping is unnecessary.

• 4. Double space the entire paper; do not use 1 ½ spacing to save room; do not produce extra lines between paragraphs to take up more room. Do not justify the right margin.

• 5. Be sure to number pages, in the top right-hand corner. If the wordprocessing program makes it easy, include your last name with each page number. Include a "Works Cited" page.

• 6. Always keep a copy of the paper: back up on a thumb drive. Don't use erasable or onion-skin paper for the original.

• 7. For poetry, enclose titles of individual poems in double quotation marks and cite line numbers, like this: ("Nutting," 12).
  For drama, italicize or underline the play's title and cite act, scene, and line numbers, like this: (Tempest, 4.1.148-50).
  For prose, italicize or underline the book's title and cite page numbers, like this: (God of Small Things, 23). Notice that numbers are cited without an accompanying "page," "pp," "lines," or other identifier: rely on the audience to know the quoted material's format. If the paper concerns one text, no need to repeat the text's title each time you cite it--just use the appropriate poetic line or prose page numbers. Most important, be consistent in the reference style you choose.

• 8. "Periods and commas go inside quotation marks," she said. "Quoted material counts"; still, semi-colons and dashes go outside quotation marks. When choosing whether to include the text's punctuation in a citation, think about how it will appear to the reader. Does the exclamation point, or the dash, or another mark make a difference to the paper's argument, for which the line is an example? Then include it. If you need to change a word within a quotation in order to make it grammatically fit a sentence, use [square brackets], not parentheses, around the changed word.

• 9. When quoting several lines (but no more than about seven), block (that's the technical term) the quotation by indenting ten spaces from the left and ten from the right. This indentation replaces quotation marks: do not use quotation marks with block quotations (unless quoting something, like dialogue, already in quotation marks in the text).

• 10. When quoting in block quotation style, the page number appears in parentheses after the final punctuation.

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