READING ENGLISH
AND WRITING ESSAYS:
A STUDENT’S GUIDE



This booklet conflates and revises material previously contained in three separate sources: the
department’s former Style Guide (devised and developed by Professor Elizabeth Archibald), an
essay writing checklist (composed by Dr Stephen James), and certain sections of the old English
Undergraduate Handbook (2008-09 version).

It is expected that this new booklet will be revised annually; comments, queries and suggestions
for additions or improvements are most welcome. Please email these to stephen.james@bristol.
ac.uk.

For further guidance on various aspects of your studies, you are encouraged to visit the Arts
Faculty webpage www.bris.ac.uk/arts/skills, where you will find advice on, for example, note-
taking and referencing, grammar skills, and online research. See also the University webpage
www.bris.ac.uk/studentskills, which leads you to a searchable directory of free courses and
resources covering issues such as time management, academic writing, critical thinking,
presentation skills, the use of computing and library facilities, and so forth. Do make the most of
what the University has to offer in terms of help and support.


Dr Stephen James
Head of Education
Department of English

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CONTENTS


Reading
English
at
University
3

Independent Study: A Checklist of Weekly Activities



4

Key
Materials
for
Regular
Reference
5

Taking
Notes
in
Seminars
and
Tutorials
6

Taking Notes in Lectures







6

Taking Notes from Books







6

Giving
a
Tutorial
or
Seminar
Presentation
7

Planning and Writing Essays







8

Plagiarism, and How to Avoid It






11


THE STYLE GUIDE:

Introduction









15

A: Essay Format and Structure






17

B: Punctuation









18

C:
Word
Order
and
Word
Relations
25

D: Errors, Dangers and Grey Areas






28

E: Quotations









35

F: References and Footnotes







44

G: Bibliography









54


1

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READING ENGLISH AT UNIVERSITY

When studying an Arts-based subject at university, your time is largely your own. This can be
both liberating and highly challenging; for many, it is the single hardest adjustment from school-
level work. Full-time English students at Bristol are firmly expected to invest forty hours a
week in their studies. For single-honours students, approximately six of these hours are covered
by formal teaching (lectures, tutorials, seminars), while joint-honours students will typically have
between two and four teaching hours in English and further hours in their other subject. That
leaves about thirty-four hours for single honours students and between sixteen and eighteen (on
the English side) for joint-honours students to spend each week on independent study.

It is down to you to draw up your own schedule of work. It is worth experimenting with a
weekly timetable, although how you will map out the hours for different tasks is likely to vary
greatly from week to week, especially with regard to the shifting ratios of reading time and
writing time. The main thing is to set aside the allotted hours and try to keep to a routine. Aim
for a work pattern of eight hours a day, five days a week (inclusive of teaching hours), or the
equivalent spread over a week (though many find it beneficial to keep one day a week completely
free from academic work). The pattern may be very flexible; you might aim to work two out of
three sections of a day: morning and afternoon but not evening, morning and evening but not
afternoon, and so forth. Take the time to work out what schedule best suits you. Trial and error
might also be involved in establishing the best location for your studies; halls of residence tend
to have quieter and noisier hours, and the library has its busy and less busy times. Many find that
varying locations through the day, or from day to day, is conducive to happy studying.

The other major adjustment university students of English have to make is to the requirement
that they read, and move between, a wide range of literary and critical works relatively quickly;
where, perhaps, students may have studied a single play of Shakespeare over a period of months,
they will now be expected to study a play (or sometimes two) in a week – hence, of course, the
need for so much independent study time. New students should be reassured that the adjustment
is not as tough as it might at first seem. Don’t be dismayed if you find that your speed of reading
and assimilation feels very slow at first. It will certainly improve, and probably quite dramatically,
with experience. Mature students, in particular, can worry about feeling out of practice, but a few
weeks should make all the difference. If you do find in general that your workload feels
unreasonably heavy, or that you are having real difficulties managing your time, talk to your unit
and/or personal tutor.




2

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INDEPENDENT STUDY: A CHECKLIST OF WEEKLY ACTIVITIES
A combination of any or all of the activities in the list below will easily fill the thirty four hours
or so that full-time students are expected to devote to private study each week. Where the
requirements in one area are relatively light in a given week (for instance, in a lull between essay
deadlines, or when the set text for a seminar or tutorial is one you have already read and
prepared notes on), this is the week for moving ahead with other aspects of your studies, and for
planning ahead to avoid undue pressures in due course. These, then, are the tasks you are
expected to juggle and, as necessary, prioritize:

 Preparing for forthcoming seminars and tutorials; this will typically involve:
(A) reading core texts and other required material (essays, handouts, etc);
(B) taking notes and identifying key passages;
(C) preparing talking points and questions for class discussion

 Preparing a seminar presentation (when required)
 Reading and planning in preparation for forthcoming essays

 Producing a first draft of an essay well in advance of the deadline
 Repeatedly revising and improving the essay before handing it in (probably two full days’
work after the completion of the draft)
 Conferring with tutors about forthcoming or recently marked essays (as required)

 Taking stock of a tutor’s comments on an essay: re-thinking ideas and phrases, re-writing
sentences or passages to one’s own satisfaction, jotting notes to self about things to
improve upon, and so forth; this may take a few hours per essay at first but the benefits to
one’s writing and confidence should be significant.

 Reading (and re-reading, as often as necessary, relevant sections of) the Style Guide
contained within this booklet and Diané Collinson et al, eds, Plain English, 2nd edn
(Buckingham: Open University Press, 2001). Do not consider this reading as a brief, one-
off exercise: you need to invest as much time as is required to reach the point where you
are confident that your prose is free from the various errors and impediments described in
these works.

 Reading a range of supplementary material from course bibliographies
 Reading in preparation for or in the light of lectures

 Reading literature beyond the requirements of the teaching programme

3

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KEY MATERIALS FOR REGULAR REFERENCE

It would be a good idea to work with the following to hand, any or all of which you can expect
to be consulting on a regular (and in some cases daily) basis:

 This booklet (in particular, for its Style Guide pages)
 The English department’s Undergraduate Handbook (and the Faculty of Arts Undergraduate
Handbook)
 A good dictionary (e.g. the Concise Oxford or The Chambers Dictionary); you can also make
use of the OED online from any university-networked PC: follow the links from the
‘Further Resources’ page of bristol.ac.uk/english/current-undergraduates/

 A thesaurus (e.g. Roget’s Thesaurus)
 Stephen Greenblatt et al, eds, The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 8th edn, 2 vols (New
York: Norton, 2006)
 Diané Collinson et al, eds, Plain English, 2nd edn (Buckingham: Open University Press,
2001)
 J. A. Cuddon, The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, 4th edn, ed.
(London: Penguin, 2004), or a similar glossary of literary and critical terms
 Margaret Drabble, ed., The Oxford Companion to English Literature, 6th edition (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2006), or Margaret Drabble and Jenny Stringer, eds, The Concise
Oxford Companion to English Literature, 3rd, rev. edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007)


4

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TAKING NOTES IN SEMINARS AND TUTORIALS
Most note-taking should take place before, not during, a taught session: jot down your ideas and
insights about the text or topic in question, and any points which you may wish to raise, and go
over these jottings just prior to each class. It is not a good idea to take extensive notes during a
tutorial or seminar (though you should always have pen and paper handy for catching occasional
ideas or references). The purpose of these sessions is to generate a process of learning through
debate and discussion and if you are too busy writing things down you won’t be able either to
participate verbally or – equally important – to remain intellectually responsive through attentive
listening.

TAKING NOTES IN LECTURES
Again, too much transcription will diminish the listening, and thus the learning, experience.
Many students find that jotting down a summary of main points, plus some references and key
words (and things to look up) is about right. An outline is more efficient than continuous prose:
it shows relationships between points more clearly and is more helpful to go back to later.
Between half a side and one side of a sheet of A4 is often the norm. You could always try
formulating on paper the gist of a lecture in a few sentences, or your own elaboration of one
particular idea that arose in the lecture and especially interested you, straight after the lecture has
been given. Don’t feel you necessarily should be writing down something every minute during
the lecture, or even every five minutes, and don’t worry about how much or little those around
you seem to be scribbling. Remember that lectures are not, principally, for instruction (though
some may contain elements of this); the benefit you take from them may reside as much (if not
more) in the regular experience of listening to the elaboration of an argument (a skill you are here
to develop for yourself) as in building up a file of notes. But some notes will clearly be handy –
and you often won’t know at the time which page of lecture notes will later yield fruitful points
of return. (For that reason, you should always record lecture titles and dates in your notes as a
matter of course.)

TAKING NOTES FROM BOOKS
Always record your notes efficiently by heading them with the name of the author and/or editor,
the title of the book or article, and the publication details: publisher, place, year (or journal title,
volume number, year). You will need these details if in due course you reference this work in an
essay. Also with an eye to future essays, be careful when taking notes that you always distinguish
as clearly as possible between the ideas and words taken from the work in question and your
own thoughts, reactions and comments (you could always initial the latter for clarity’s sake, or
else keep them on a separate page from text-derived notes). You will find some critical books
useful in their entirety, but many will be useful in part: an introduction, a specific chapter and/or
material traced via the index might sometimes suffice. Some books or articles, even if useful or
absorbing, may be too generalized (or tangential to your concerns) for much note-taking to be
appropriate; others may be so eloquent that you feel the temptation to transcribe more than you
really need; often, a brief summary of a work and a few representative quotations will be enough.
If the work you are reading is a core literary text that you will be talking and/or writing about, be
sure to jot down page references to key passages and insights that occur to you as you go along;
there will often be insufficient time for a full re-read, especially of very long works.

5

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GIVING A TUTORIAL OR SEMINAR PRESENTATION
Students are often required to give brief presentations in seminars (and occasionally in one-hour
tutorials). Individual tutors will advise as to what is expected for specific teaching sessions, but
the general principle is that presentations are intended to initiate debate by raising issues,
questions, and problems; they will often identify a particular passage (or passages) of the text (or
texts) being discussed which the tutorial or seminar group might then go on to examine further.

Bear in mind that a presentation is not supposed to be the final word on its designated subject.
Feel free to be speculative, to call attention to things you don’t understand, to problems, puzzles
and obscurities. Feel free also to make cross-references, if you think them fruitful, to other works
by the writer you are talking about (a quotation from a letter, say, or a sentence from an essay),
or to a brief quotation or phrase from literary criticism or theory, or to an especially relevant
historical detail. Passing comparisons to texts studied earlier in the course might also be of use,
as, on occasion, might a very brief handout for fellow students – although this often won’t be
necessary. Try to avoid unduly summarizing what will already have been read and considered by
the group ahead of the teaching session; you should seek to develop, illustrate or play with the
ideas everyone has encountered in their reading, not simply restate them.

A presentation should not be written out word for word beforehand, but should be improvised
from notes and addressed to the group clearly (with a bit of eye contact, if possible) and at an
appropriate speed. Don’t rush through it. But don’t exceed the stipulated time either; if a tutor
asks for a five or ten minute presentation, you should be fairly sure beforehand that what you
want to say will be delivered within the requested duration. Over-long presentations reduce
group discussion time (a precious commodity) and can throw the tutor’s plan for what will be
covered during the session as a whole. They also often attempt to take on more than is required.

The prospect of giving a presentation often makes people nervous; the reality is generally not
half as stressful as feared. Remember that you only need to speak for a few minutes, that others
in your group will probably be nervous about presentations too (and thus will be with you in
silent sympathy), that your role is simply to start the ball rolling, not to carry the burden of the
session on behalf of your peers, and, above all, that you are NOT ON TRIAL! There is no
expectation that you deliver a set-piece performance; you simply need to draw together, as clearly
as possible, a few ideas and quotations (or references to textual moments) in order to provide
prompts for further discussion. Remember also that you have probably done something like this
already at school, and that the experience will be useful for future job situations that involve
addressing a group of people.

Those not giving a presentation should not feel the week’s duties have passed to another group
member; indeed, a good way of preparing for any tutorial or seminar is to imagine what you
would say, were you the presenter. As the presentation is given, listen out for correspondences
between what is being said and what interests you in the text(s) under discussion. Does the
presentation raise new questions or issues? Does anything in its contents alter your point of view,
or clarify a previously grey area? How would you like to follow up on any of the issues being
raised? Once the presentation has finished, chances are it will be over to you…

6

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PLANNING AND WRITING ESSAYS
The kind of essay which you produce at university should be much more developed and
extended than your sixth-form or equivalent essays were, but it will probably take you some time
to work up to this. This is why grades for first-year essays and exams do not count towards your
degree mark; you have time to experiment, gain experience and benefit from feedback and
guidance.

There is no fixed structure with which the English essays you write at Bristol must comply, no
single approach which must be adopted, and no uniform style in which essays must be written.
Different strategies can quite legitimately be employed on different occasions, depending on the
demands of the particular subject and the interests and intentions of the individual writer.

Specific guidance on points of composition and referencing is provided in the Style Guide
section of this booklet, but below is some generalized, NON-PRESCRIPTIVE advice about
approaching the essay-writing task.

Responding to Titles
While some written assignments invite response to a set question (or one of a choice of
questions), you will find that university essay titles often take the form of a statement by a critic
which you are invited to discuss. You must understand and take up the terms of the statement,
and follow through on its implications when analyzing specific features of the text or texts to
which it refers, or is being made to refer. Keeping the title in mind is part of what gives an essay
shape and direction: there needs to be a trajectory of thought that the reader can trace and stay
with, even if there are complications in your elaboration of ideas. Sometimes this trajectory will
be an ‘argument’ that advances claim X (and possibly also opposes it to claim Y), but sometimes
the ‘argument’ (so-called) will be less obviously argumentative and more in the nature of an
unfolding enquiry. This is fine, so long as the essay has an intelligible structure and sense of
progression.

You should regard every essay as an attempt to persuade your reader of a particular point of view
(or way of reading), but that doesn’t mean that you have to be stridently for or against a title
proposition or reductive in your approach. Sound critical thinking is often tentative or marked by
ambivalence, and it is perfectly acceptable to take an ‘on the one hand … on the other’ approach
to a given title, affirming its implications in certain respects while questioning them in others.

The Planning Stage
Suppose you have chosen (or been given) a particular essay title, that you have dwelt on its
implications and started to think through its relevance to the texts (or texts) to which your essay
will respond, and that you have read and taken relevant notes from both primary (that is, literary)
and secondary (that is, critical, theoretical or contextual) works. At this point, you are not, of
course, necessarily ready to begin writing; after all, a heap of notes is not, in itself, a plan. You
might, at this stage, want to draw up a list of numbered points, perhaps with some key notes-to-
self and a central quotation (or more than one) attached to each. You need to move from a
welter of ideas to a line of thought. This line will partly emerge through composition, but it

7

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should also, up to a point, be traced out in advance. If it isn’t, you run two major risks: doubling
back on yourself in the essay, and running out of space for points and examples you had hoped
to include.

Try to think of planning as a process of both accumulation and sifting. One often notes down
more observations and quotations than an essay of a prescribed length will easily accommodate,
and deciding what to leave out can often be as tricky as determining what to prioritize. Working
on a PC can be helpful in this regard: using the cut and paste facility to move around your notes
and play with the possible running order of paragraph points can help you make that all-
important leap from a bundle of ideas to a curve of thought. If you feel that too much
transposing of material is going on, you may need to take a step back and consider repositioning
the frames of your enquiry. Similarly, if you feel that too many quotations or ‘side issue’ points
are crowding your notes, be discriminating and remove the surplus material. (You might shunt
such material to the foot of your document or create a parallel file headed, say, ‘surplus.doc’; if
your ideas change in due course, you can always move relegated notes back into the design.) Do
not start writing the essay itself if your notes are still in a muddle. KEEP THE PLAN SIMPLE.
And remember that you cannot say everything.

The Writing Stage
Be prepared to attempt two or three rough versions of your introduction, until you feel you are
happy with the particular slant, or the well-phrased provisionality, of your opening remarks.
Good introductions come in many forms, but are often relatively brief and to the point, without
conveying a reductive or dogmatic response to the central proposition with which they are
engaged; they are in touch with the implications of the title and identify the outlines of the
territory one is about to chart. It is quite possible that the introduction may be both the first and
the last paragraph you write, in that you may wish to revise some of your opening formulations
in the light of what you find you have gone on to say, but the fact that an essay may, up to a
point, discover its own direction in the act of composition is not a justification for putting off
the writing of a draft introduction until the end: it is unlikely that you will be ready to develop a
clear, coherent argument until you have formulated (however tentatively) an initial response to
the subject in hand.

Avoid the temptation to use page one of your essay to ‘warm up’. Resist in particular the sluggish
‘George Eliot was born in 1819’ kind of build-up. Also avoid plot summaries. You have a case to
prove, or a line of thinking to develop, and you must not defer or distract from the task in hand.
Contextual and/or historical facts must always earn their place in an essay of literary criticism.
They should be drawn upon with discrimination at those points where the detail supplied
enhances the persuasiveness of what you are asserting. KEEP IT RELEVANT!

Every paragraph has a discrete amount of work to do, and often its central purpose will be clear
from its opening sentence. At the very least, you should bear in mind that your reader will
probably respond to this first sentence as an orientation point, so veering too abruptly away from
it in what follows is liable to confuse. You may be familiar with the ‘state-quote-analyze’ model
for a paragraph often touted in schools, and this does provide a helpful, if rudimentary, starting

8

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point for thinking about the paragraph as a unit of thought that defines and develops a particular
stage in an unfolding enquiry. But, of course, a reductive application of this model to one’s
writing might lead to a pastry-cutter approach since different paragraphs often need to do
different kinds of intellectual work. The key thing is to consider carefully the primary function of
each paragraph in turn – in which regard you should avoid both the fragmentary, ‘unfulfilled’ and
the rambling, ‘over-stuffed’ paragraph. Also, always ask yourself whether your breaks between
one paragraph and the next are likely to seem arbitrary or well-judged to your reader.

Quotations will, of course, provide important staging posts in the elaboration of your ‘argument’
or enquiry; in many paragraphs, your points will be supported by textual examples which will
then be analysed in sufficient depth and detail to bring out the full force of the claims you are
making – or the ideas you are pursuing. Take time (ideally at the planning stage) to choose
exactly the right passages to illustrate your points. Make sure that you quote neither less nor
more of each passage than you need; there is no virtue in copying out huge chunks of a text, and
often a few words will make your point more effectively. Don’t leave your quotations to do all
your argumentative work for you: they don’t necessarily speak for themselves and you will
usually need to explore their significance in your own words – which doesn’t, of course, mean
that you should inertly paraphrase what you have quoted. Your reader’s attention needs to be
drawn to the particular features of the quotation (salient words or images, metrical, rhetorical or
rhythmical effects, and so forth) which support and help you develop your line of reading.

How to end an essay is often tricky. One danger is that the conclusion may come across as a
stockpile of previously unmade (or under-developed) points. Another is that it may include
excessive recycling of ideas already sufficiently expressed: there is quite a difference between
striking a summarizing note and going back over well-trodden ground. Learning from the
practice of critics you admire may prove particularly useful in suggesting alternative ways of
rounding off an enquiry. And, as with introductions, experimenting with draft versions can pay
great dividends here. In particular, a resonant and clarifying final sentence can often provide a
satisfying sense of closure.

Always aim to ‘touch the far side’ of an essay AT LEAST twenty-four hours before the deadline
for submission (preferably earlier). You should then revise the work, re-reading it several times
and with scrupulous attention. In part, you will be ‘proofing’ the work by checking for
grammatical, punctuation or spelling errors; but you also need to attend to the fluency of the
argument as a whole, and may find that you have to rephrase, cut or expand various formulations
in order to enhance clarity. Above all, you must think of revision as an integral part of the
composition process, rather than an optional extra stage. Indeed, the revising intelligence is
central to your development as an essayist, as the following paragraph makes clear.

After the Event
Every essay you write can and should be better than the one before. You are more likely to
achieve this goal by setting aside regular time for thinking specifically about composition:
working through this booklet and Plain English, and going back over old essays. Build this activity
in to your week-to-week timetable. It might be good practice to re-read each essay closely and in

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