Paper #1: Some Common Pitfalls

1. Paper #1: Some Common Pitfalls English 206/1

2. Formatting Error: Titles • Titles of essays, poems, and short stories are placed in quotation marks: “Proto-Leaf” by Walt Whitman. • Titles of novels and other freestanding books are italicized or underlined: Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman.

3. Formatting Error: Long quotations • Readers tend to skim or even skip long quotations. For them to work, you have to draw visual attention to them. We do this by placing all quotations of more than FOUR lines of prose or THREE of poetry in “block” form. • Block quotations are not easy to format correctly, so use them sparingly! Here are the formatting guidelines: • (a) Block quotations must be indented 0.5,” single-spaced, and one font size smaller than the main text. • (b) Reproduce the passage EXACTLY as it appears in the book. • (c) Page references are included in parentheses outside the quotation. See the example below: Frank Webb’s The Garies and Their Friends begins with a lavish teatime gathering, and the penultimate chapter centers around another sumptuous meal. Webb describes the presentation of the main course of the dinner using language that initially seems very appealing: Then came the supper. Oh, such a supper!—such quantities of nice things as money and skill alone can bring together. There were turkeys innocent of a bone, into which you might plunge your knife to the very hilt without coming in contact with a splinter—turkeys from which cunning cooks had extracted every bone leaving the meat alone behind, with the skin not perceptibly broken. (376)

4. Formatting Error: Long quotations (con’t.) Block quotations have to be there for a reason. As with all quotations, follow them up with analysis!!! So, for the previous quotation from Webb: Then came the supper. Oh, such a supper!—such quantities of nice things as money and skill alone can bring together. There were turkeys innocent of a bone, into which you might plunge your knife to the very hilt without coming in contact with a splinter—turkeys from which cunning cooks had extracted every bone leaving the meat alone behind, with the skin not perceptibly broken. (376) Looking closely at this description, however, we begin to recognize that Webb is asking the reader to recognize the ironic relationship between the feast and the events of the novel. He reminds us of the violence that has been done to the turkeys, “into which you might plunge your knife to the very hilt.” Even before they are brought out for the guests, the cooks had removed all of their bones, but without leaving a trace on the outside. Perhaps Webb is suggesting that even the young people who have survived the violent events of the novel have suffered terrible inner wounds that have left no mark on the skin, or perhaps deprived them of backbone. Or maybe he is offering the more controversial hint that the guests are in effect cannibalizing the older generation whose sacrifice has made their luxury possible. Whatever the case may be, Webb is parodying the work of the cooks by deliberately wrapping up terrible violence in beautiful language.

5. Grammatical Error: Literary present • Keep your verb tense in the present when you discuss events which occur in a literary work. The events in a literary work did not actually happen, so they are not part of the past. • Sample error: One was Pilgrim’s Progress, about a man that left his family, it didn’t say why. The statements was interesting, but tough. • You only switch into the past perfect for events that occur “behind the scenes,” as in the following sentence from an example above: “Even before they are brought out for the guests, the cooks had removed all of their bones, but without leaving a trace on the outside.” • When writing about events in a book, you NEVER use the simple past tense. However, when you talk about history, literary or otherwise, you should use the past tense. So notice how the two tenses are woven together in the following paragraphs: • CORRECT: Twain’s popularity came at a time in American history when the vernacular began to appear even in genteel literature. In the 1870s, Twain began to write ever more sophisticated versions of the form; Huck Finn narrates his adventures entirely in dialect.

6. Grammatical Error: Plurals • With only a few rare exceptions, apostrophes do not turn words into plurals. This goes for capitalized nouns, too. Sample error: “The European’s have the belief that the Typee are savages.”

7. Grammatical Error: “Its” versus “It’s” • Learn to distinguish the two. Write “it’s” with an apostrophe ONLY in cases where you can substitute the clause “it is.” • Sample error: “Since he has proven that they have such good nature and humanity, the word savage has been stripped of it’s original meaning.” • Its’ is not, and has never been, a word. It’s just wrong.

8. Grammatical Error: Compound adjectives • When compound adjectives precede a noun, they need to be hyphenated. Sample error: “Drawing (supposedly) on his real life experiences among a tribe of Pacific Islanders, Melville takes a first person narrative position through the eyes of a man named Tom.” • When compound modifiers are predicate complements (i.e., do not precede nouns), they do not take hyphens. Example of correct usage: “The well-versed politician’s blunder surprised me; the move was ill advised. His ‘I’m-an-outsider’ rhetoric was not very well thought through.” • Phrases that wear one hat as compound adjectives can also play other roles for which they do not get hyphenated. Sample error: “Melville wrote Typee in the first-person in the nineteenth-century.”

9. Grammatical Error: Relative pronouns • Use “who” for people and “that” for things. Sample error: “When Tommo makes his plan to escape the ship there is originally no one he can think of that he trusts enough to share his plan with.” • Choosing between “who” and “whom” tends to be confusing because it is determined retrospectively. That is, the choice is based on its function in the subsequent clause. Sample error: “As time goes by he begins to wonder whom the savage one is, the Typee or himself.” Take another example: • INCORRECT: “Charlie Ellis is the character whom we think will succeed.” • “The character” is actually the subject of the second clause in the sentence: • CORRECT: “Charlie Ellis is the character who we think will win.” • One more example: • INCORRECT: I will give our support to whomever opposes the war. • CORRECT: I will give our support to whoever opposes the war.

10. Grammatical Error: Comma splices • If you have a sentence in which there are two parts that could stand alone as separate sentences, you need a stronger mark than a comma to join or “splice” them together. This mark can be a colon or semicolon, or (more rarely) a dash or ellipsis. Sample error: “Tommo uses it on a regular basis in describing the Typees, however he begins to think his describing of the Typee as ‘savage’ is a wrong statement.” • But contrast this correct sentence, which also has “however” but doesn’t need anything more than a comma: “Though Tom assimilates, he does not, however, allow himself to be fully absorbed.” • To make things simple, you can also use a period instead of a semicolon.

11. Grammatical Error: Parallelism • When you group actions or things in a sentence, be sure to make all items in the list share the same grammatical function. • Sample error: “He is human and so sometimes his feelings and actions are inconsistent, like his embrace of Typee culture and people and then fleeing it to return to the Western world he is so critical of.” • Sample error: “The transition from fear of the Typee to embracing their culture is made quite quickly.”

12. Grammatical Error: Pronouns • Pronouns always have to replace a noun. That noun has to be named somewhere in the preceding sentences. • Sample error: “This story examines how one may make a culture up in his or her own mind as they go along.” • Conversely, make sure your pronoun is only replacing one noun, not several. • One kind of unclarity: “The language of Tom’s mocking description of Marheyo shows how ignorant he is.”

13. Grammatical Error: “Than” versus “then” • “Than” is used for comparisons, “then” for sequences. • Sample error: “Typee has probably had a much greater impact on the examination of imperialism in our contemporary readings of the novel after the fact then it ever did during the imperialistic age in which it was published.”

14. Stylistic Pitfall: Uninformative contextualization • Context clues that lead into quotations should be helpful and informative. • Sample throwaway phrase: “In a particular scene, Tommo has gained permission of the Typee king, Mehevi, to take Fayaway aboard a canoe.” Sample throwaway phrase: “Whitman oten uses ‘I’ and ‘you’ to suggest a conversation. In Whitman’s Song of Myself, for example, he said, …”

15. Stylistic Pitfall: “Throat-clearing” introductions • Don’t feel compelled to write a lengthy introduction unless it’s catchy. Extra information that’s not relevant to an argument should be deleted. • Sample pitfall intro: “Coming from Long Island, New York, Walt Whitman was born May 31 1819 through March 26 1892.”

16. Stylistic Pitfall: Sloppy topic sentences • Bad introductions won’t kill you, but consistently beginning paragraphs with poor topic sentences can. • The focus of topic sentences can be altered for variety; but quotations, summaries, and character descriptions tend to be weaker than simple claims that advance your thesis.