Ode on a Grecian URL

Thursday, October 06, 2005

Citations of Immortality

So, citation: everybody's favorite topic. I'll try to make what I'm looking for as clear as I can.

The most important thing is that you cite every specific idea, bit of information and bit of language you get from somewhere else. This does not include talking your argument over casually with a friend or formally with a writing instructor. This does include stuff that came up in lecture, in discussion, in supplementary readings (the editors' introductions to our poems, the Biographia Literaria or Keats's letters, for example), or from the internet.
I ask you to cite things MLA style. The rules that follow are distillations of what you can find in the MLA handbook.
Poems should be cited by line. Thus if you are quoting lines 2 and 3 of "Tintern Abbey," after those lines you should include, inside the sentence and inside parentheses, (2-3). That is, "again I hear / These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs" (2-3).
Super top-secret English-geek-only rule: if you want to cite two sequential lines, you can write (2f), meaning line two and the following one. If you are citing multiple lines in a row, you can write (2ff), meaning line two and following.
Other things to notice: others' words are enclosed in quotation marks; an ellipsis ("...") designates elided text in the middle of a quotation; the slash mark designates line separation; punctuation and capitalization is retained.
Non-poetic quotations should be cited by page, but in the same way. If you're quoting from the Biographia Literaria, for example, you might write "that willing suspension of disbelief . . . which constitutes poetic faith" (478).
If it is not clear from the context of your paragraph whom or what you are citing, include the author's name (if you are writing on only one work by that author) or the text's title in the parentheses. Thus This is what Wordsworth means by "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" (242) or The "Rime" can be considered a true "spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" (Wordsworth, 242).
If you are citing (or paraphrasing) the editors' notes, the author name to use is Abrams et al. (for M. H. Abrams, the main editor of our Norton anthology, and his assistant editors). Thus: It is for reasons such as this emphasis on "the language really spoken by men" that Wordsworth's "Preface" is called "a revolutionary manifesto" (Abrams et al., 238).
Those of you quoting the marginalia for "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" are getting into some of the beautiful obscurantisms of the MLA style. Convention is to cite the line(s) attached to the marginal notes and to add an "n." signifying note. For example: The annotator characterizes the albatross as "one of the invisible inhabitants of this planet" (131ff n.).
Citing or paraphrasing one of the class lectures? The format is simple: The sublime, one of Shelley's poetic preoccupations, negotiates the difference between the political and the poetic (Ortiz-Robles, 6 October 2005).
If you are only working with the class texts, don't worry about having a Works Cited page. If you are also citing information you've gleaned from the internet or from other sources, please include a short bibliography. (Rules for formatting references are available on the Writing Center's writer's handbook website.)
If you run into anything not covered here, do the best you can. The rule of thumb is to provide enough information for your reader to be able to find the exact information you quote or paraphrase. (You're welcome to try emailing me if you want more specific citation advice, but it's not likely I'll be able to get back to you before the essay is due.)