Ballad of Birmingham BY DUDLEY RANDALL

Ballad of Birmingham BY DUDLEY RANDALL

ENGL 1302 Poetry Essay Guidelines Each student will research and write an explication or analysis essay over one of the poems studied in our poetry unit. Your poetry essay should follow these guidelines: 2-3 typed pages, 12 point font, Times New Roman, MLA documentation style, 6 quotes—one quote from each of the three sources found during research, and three from the poem itself. Follow MLA formatting guidelines. Create an interesting and original title for your essay. Center your title on the first page of your essay. Capitalize the words in your title according to MLA guidelines. (Look up “Titles-capitalization of” in the index of your Harbrace Essentials text for capitalization rules. Follow those rules.) MLA does not use bold print or a larger font for a title. Use the same font and size as the text, and use double space before and after a title. A Works Cited page should accompany the essay. The Works Cited page should be the last page of the essay. It should be on a page by itself. Insert your header and continue page numbering in the top right corner of the page. Title the page “Works Cited.” Center the title on the one inch top margin. No bold or larger font is required. See the example essay and Works Cited page in the MLA section of your Harbrace Essentials text. I recommended that you create a Works Cited page in a separate file from your essay, as that way you do not have to worry about the top margin with the page’s title moving up or down as you make edits to your paper. Remember: Insert the header with the proper page number at the top of the page. Type it in by hand on the Works Cited page. Use a 1 inch top and side margins and hanging indentation for each entry on the Works Cited page. Center the title at the top of the page. All sources listed on your Works Cited page (You should have 4–1 for each of your 3 sources and 1 for the poem accessed in your literature book or on a Website) should be arranged by alphabetical order. Use the first main word (“a, an, the” are not main words. All other words are.) of each listing to determine alphabetical order. Creating this page by hand is extremely challenging, as each entry must be arranged and punctuated exactly by MLA guidelines. Make an account with RefWorks ProQuest using your Brazosport College email address. Create your own password for the account. Save your sources and create your Works Cited page with RefWorks ProQuest. RefWorks ProQuest has several short tutorial videos to help you better use their site. View the ones applicable to your needs. If you need further assistance using RefWorks ProQuest after viewing the tutorial videos, contact Brent, Ashley, or Patrick in the BC library. Be sure to set RefWorks ProQuest for MLA 8 to create your Works Cited page. Review MLA guidelines for creating entries on the Works Cited page and for quoting lines of poetry in the MLA section of your Harbrace Essentials textbook, RefWorks ProQuest, and Purdueowlmla.com. Insert a slash in a poetry quotation to show a line break the author/editor uses in a poem. Enclose the entire quotation in quotation marks to set it apart from your own words. Insert the poem’s line number(s) that you have quoted in parenthesis after the quotation (1-2). For a poetry quotation of 2 lines or less, place the period for the sentence after the closing parenthesis of the line citation at the end of the sentence, not inside the closing quotation mark. If you copy an exclamation mark or a question mark from the poem, include that punctuation mark inside the closing quotation mark of the quote. If you copy a period or a comma in the last line your quotation, do not include that punctuation inside the closing quotation mark. Place that mark after the closing parenthesis of the citation at the end of the sentence. See examples for quoting lines of poetry in the MLA section of your Harbrace Essentials textbook, RefWorks ProQuest, and at Purdueowlmla.com. If a poetry quotation includes 3 or more lines of a poem, set off the entire quotation with an extra margin. This margin should be 1 inch from the left side margin. This extra margin should be a 2 tab indentation which is 1 more indentation than a paragraph beginning. When using the extra margin to set off a poetry quotation of more than 3 lines, do not add a slash to mark each line break. Instead, insert the line breaks exactly as the author/editor does in your primary—our literature book or the Web copy of the poem linked to our content page. Begin each line of your quote from the poem on the double indentation. Do not add quotation marks to a long poetry quotation. Only use quotation marks on a long quote if you copy them from the primary source from which you accessed the poem. On a long poetry quotation (a quotation of 3 or more lines), place the line citation at the end of the quote. Place the ending punctuation, including a period, inside the quotation, as the extra margin sets the citation apart from the next line(s) of your essay. After your citation, begin your next line of your essay flush with the left page margin.