Introduction to Literary Research

Issues that many of you in Introduction to Literary Research need to work to improve.

• Taking careful notes and correct bibliographical information. Several of you lost notes and needed to reproduce work already completed.
• Proofreading. You need to proofread your sentence-level prose to make sure that it makes sense and that all words are spelled as they should be.
• Format titles correctly.
• Titles of full-length works are placed in italics (or underlined): novel titles, book titles; titles of collections of poetry, titles of reference works, magazine titles.
• Titles of shorter works that are normally published as pieces within full-length works are placed in quotation marks: poem titles, chapter titles, essay or journal article titles, chapter titles.
• When capitalizing titles, the first, the last, and all major words are capitalized. Note that most library data bases do NOT follow this standard, but MLA format does.
• Follow appropriate format for MLA Works Cited pages — exactly. Understand that most on-line databases, in fact most printed sources do not use MLA citation form. The Literature program is asking that you do.
• Many of you mix singular and plural antecedents/pronouns. Consider the following sentences. “It is up to a reader to decide whether they believe a source is authoritative.” “It is up to readers to decide whether they believe a source is authoritative.”

• Some of you found perfectly good answers through google or wikipedia and were less than pleased to be asked to corroborate those answers with sources found in Stockton’s library. Let me repeat that a very great deal of important research material — both primary source work and secondary source work — is not on line. Some of it will probably never be on line. If your strength is internet searching alone, you are cutting yourself off from a great mass of important and interesting material.