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

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• 1. Your essay should be typed with at least one-inch margins all around.

• 2. Do not use a title page.

• 3. Your name, the date, and the course title should be typed, single-spaced, on the first page in the upper right-hand corner. Your title should be centered. Do not indent the first paragraph, but indent the beginning of each subsequent paragraph without skipping any extra lines.

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

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

• 6. Always keep a copy of your paper for yourself: 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.
  F or 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: your audience will know the quoted material's format. If your paper concerns one text, you needn't repeat that title each time you cite your reference--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. If you need to change a word within a quotation in order to make it fit your sentence grammatically, use [square brackets], not parentheses, around the changed word.

• 9. When quoting several lines (but no more than about seven), "block" 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 you are 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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