Skip to the content | Change text size

Presentation of Essays

Part One ─ General Information

The School of English, Communications and Performance Studies expects as part of your professional training that your essays will be properly presented. For one thing, this enables your tutor to concentrate on assessing your ideas and argument. An essay that is not correctly presented (or is illegible) will be handed back, unmarked, and you will be asked to rewrite and resubmit your work.

Essay Administration

For information about lodging your essay, due dates, extensions and late submission penalties see Administrative Information.

Format

Length

Essays and exercises vary in length. The required length should be strictly observed. Rarely are essays too short; any faults are usually in the opposite direction. What is required is that you learn to write with a brevity that is consistent with clarity of argument and sufficient exploration of the topic. At the end of your essay give an estimate of its length (your word-processor can do this for you).

Advice on Preparation

Do adequate preliminary work and make a trial draft of your essay. Your tutor can discuss your plan with you but should not be asked to read drafts. Consequently you should be your own first and fiercest critic. Do away with wordy preliminaries. Aim straight at the topic and introduce it clearly. Prune verbosities and sharpen arguments. You can reasonably assume, for instance, that your tutor knows the work you are discussing, so don’t waste time in summarising the story or contents. Rushed, last-minute essays often become too long. Give yourself time to criticise your work and to rewrite and cut where necessary.

Part Two – Style

Note that there are other styles than the one suggested below. It is important that you observe a style and use it consistently in your essay.

Titles

Use italics (or underlining in handwriting or typescript) for the titles of works (including films) published separately (e.g. Hamlet or Hamlet, Australian Short Stories or Australian Short Stories, The Third Man or The Third Man), and for the titles of periodicals (e.g. PMLA or PMLA. Southerly or Southerly). The titles of smaller works not published separately (e.g. shorter poems, short stories, essays and articles) are placed in inverted commas (e.g. “Ode to a Nightingale”, “The Real Thing”, “Marvell and the Poetry of Rural Solitude”). Consistency in citing titles is important: “The intellectual energy of Hamlet” is quite a different matter from “the intellectual energy of Hamlet”.

Quotations

Short quotations (up to 2 or 3 lines or 60 words) should be placed in inverted commas and worked into the body of your sentence or paragraph. Your sentence must be reworked so that the grammar of the quotation fits naturally into it. Longer quotations should begin on a new line and should be indented (i.e. placed an inch or so inside your regular margin). If a quotation is indented do not use quotation marks: the indenting suffices to indicate the quotation. If you are typing use single spacing for indented quotations. Give page or line references in brackets at the end of your indented quotation – e.g. (pp. 456-7) or (II. 23-36).

If you are quoting poetry at length set it out in its proper lines. In short quotations slashes (/) are used to separate lines of poetry and the capital letter beginning each line is retained, e.g. “images like ‘the hapless Soldier’s sigh/Runs in blood down palace walls’ vividly portray Blake’s hatred of tyranny”.

Tense

When reporting the action or describing character or narrative technique in a story, play or film, use the present tense. e.g. “In Heart of Darkness, Marlow pilots a river steamer into the heart of Africa” (not ‘piloted’) or “In Hamlet, Hamlet meditates revenge and then meditates again” (not ‘meditated’). This will enable you to move flexibly back and forth between events or points in the text without being constrained by the narrative sequence. It is accepted critical practice.

References and Footnotes

Quotations from the prescribed text

When you quote from the prescribed text, a page reference (in the case of a book or article) or a line reference (in the case of a play) should be put in brackets immediately after each quotation – not in a footnote. You should use “p.” (for “page”) and “l.” (for “line”): e.g. (p. 27) or (l. 13). “Pages” and “lines” are indicated by “pp.” and “ll.”. For Shakespeare plays give act, scene and line numbers in numbers as (5.3.37─8). Indicate in the bibliography the edition of the text you are using.

Quotations from secondary material (critical works)

Notes and references from secondary material should be given either as footnotes (i.e. at the foot of the page), beginning new footnote numbers with each page, or as endnotes at the conclusion of the essay. You may not need to draw on secondary material at all. If you do, the principle to follow is that the first reference to an article or book should identify it clearly enough for a reader to track it down in the edition you list in your footnote and your bibliography. After the first reference, identification may be as brief as is consistent with avoiding ambiguity, e.g:

2 Wilfred Stone, The Cave and the Mountain: a Study of E.M.Forster (London: Routledge, 1966), pp. 217─8.

Then, for a later reference:

5 Stone, p. 228.>

or

8 Stephen A. Reid, “‘The Unspeakable Rites’ in Heart of Darkness” in Conrad: a Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Marvin Mudrick (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Harper Collins, 1966), p. 53.

Then, for a later reference:

12 Reid, p. 55.

When giving references, please follow the format described under “Titles” and “Quotations”. Notice, again, that a book title is underlined or in italics, without quotation marks; an article has quotation marks and is not underlined or italicised. It is a useful practice if you get confused about footnotes to follow the usage of any book published recently by a reputable publisher such as Melbourne University Press.

Bibliography

List all works you have consulted in preparing your essay, including the edition(s) of the set text(s), even if no specific reference is made to them in the finished essay. Works should be listed alphabetically by author at the end of the essay, e.g:

Alders, P., ‘Empson on Pastoral’, New Literary History, 10 (1978), 101─23.
Groves, P., and G. Hiller, Character Books of the English Renaissance: a Selection, Asheville, N.C.: Pegasus Press, 2005.
Montaigne, M. de, Essays, trans. J.M.Cohen, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1958.

Part Three ─ Expression, Grammar and Originality

Expression

If you have problems with written expression, you should concentrate early in the year on developing skills of clear and accurate writing. Time spent doing this will be a good investment: it not only saves you the time of re-writing essays but is useful for all your university courses. Your tutor can advise you, and will probably make corrections and suggestions on your essays or discuss them with you. For desktop help try:

J. Clanchy and B. Ballard, Essay Writing for Students, Longman, 1981.
J. R. Bernard, A Short Guide to Traditional Grammar, Sydney, 1975.

Arts Language and Learning can help you with advice on essay-writing and problems of written expression. Monash Language and Learning Online also contains excellent advice.

Spelling

Most spelling mistakes can be picked up by reading your essay through carefully before you hand it in. If necessary, use a dictionary or a spelling book. If you spell particularly badly get someone else to read your essay through and take the trouble to note the words that you mis-spelt for future reference. Do not rely on word-processor spell-checks alone, because a mis-spelling of a given word may constitute an accurate spelling of a different word (e.g: “the characters all have there obsessions”). If your spelling is not up to scratch, don’t shrug it off as unimportant: learn! It may be unfair and inappropriate, but readers tend to interpret consistently poor spelling as a sign of low intelligence.

The following words are often mis-spelt:

Distinguish between the verbs effect and affect, precede and proceed; lie and lay, evoke and invoke, imply and infer. Check their proper use in a dictionary.

The Use of the Apostrophe

The apostrophe is used to denote a relationship between two nouns, generally as an alternative to a phrase using of. For example: the bride’s father instead of the father of the bride, Eliot’s poem instead of the poem of Eliot. Note that when the noun is singular (bride, Eliot) the apostrophe goes before the ‘s’; when it is plural (the seven brides’ bouquets) the apostrophe goes after the ‘s’. If a singular noun already ends in ‘s’, the apostrophe goes after this ‘s’, and normally another ‘s’ is added e.g. James’s short story, Dickens’s novel, Keats’s poem. In certain Biblical and Classical names the second ‘s’ is omitted: e.g. Jesus’, Moses’ Xerxes’, Sophocles’.

The apostrophe is also used in contractions of “grammatical” words such as is, are, have, had and not, as in you’re welcome (i.e. ‘you are welcome’), not your welcome (which means something else). Thus it’s is a contraction of it is, and not the possessive form of it (which is its): “It’s (= it is) a pity that the dog has lost its (his/her) collar” is correct. Do not use the apostrophe in normal plurals, or in verbs ending in ‘s’ (i.e. don’t write comma’s or stanza’s or come’s).

Plagiarism

The submission of essays, assignments and homework is an essential part of the learning process and a vital way of assessing students’ understanding of a unit. The submitted work must therefore be students’ own work. This does not mean that students may not make use of the work of others. However, in quoting or paraphrasing material from other sources, those sources must be acknowledged in full. It may be useful to seek the help of a tutor in preparing the piece of work and to enlist the help of fellow students in sorting out ideas, but the final product must be written by you in your own words. Plagiarism is a form of cheating, and as such, an offence for which a student can be charged under Statute 4.1 Part III - Academic Misconduct in the Monash University Calendar.

The following hints will help students avoid plagiarism:

See also Plagiarism on the Language and Learning Online website.

School of ECPS

For...

School Information

Incorporating