The conventions of literary writing exist so that a reader can spend their attention on your argument instead of on your formatting. Learn them once.
The rules that matter
- Present tense for the text. Juliet decides. Past tense only for the world: Shakespeare wrote the play around 1595.
- Titles: italics for plays, novels, films; “quotation marks” for short stories, poems, articles, episodes.
- Quote verse line by line, with a slash for a line break in a short quotation: “But soft, what light through yonder window breaks? / It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.” Longer than three lines: block it, indented, no quotation marks.
- Cite drama by act, scene, and line (2.2.2–3), prose by page.
- Introduce and explain every quotation. Claim, evidence, explanation — the third move is where the marks live.
- Never summarise the plot. Your reader has read it.
- Name the writer, not “the author”.
The paragraph that works
Juliet’s soliloquy in Act 2 is not a love speech but a legal one. She spends eleven lines on the problem of a name — “Deny thy father and refuse thy name” — before she says anything about feeling. Shakespeare gives his thirteen-year-old the vocabulary of contracts and inheritance precisely because the obstacle in this play is not emotion but property, and Juliet is the first character to say so out loud.
Claim, evidence, explanation, and a link outward. Notice that the quotation is four words long: quote the phrase you are analysing, not the speech it lives in.
Signposting an argument without announcing it
Weak: In this essay I will discuss three ways…
Strong: The feud survives every attempt to end it because the play never lets an adult speak to a child without a threat in the sentence.
The second names the argument, and the reader now knows what to watch for. See The Essay for the whole structure.
Three habits that flatten an essay
Padding (“since the dawn of time”), plot summary wearing an analytical hat, and quotation dumping — a paragraph that is 60% quoted text is a paragraph that has not been written.
Curriculum connection
C2.3
use appropriate descriptive and evocative words, phrases, and expressions to make their writing clear, vivid, and interesting for their intended audience (e.g., identify concrete, specific words they can use to depict objects and events vividly and with exactness; identify long-winded expressions they can replace with more concise language)
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C3.1
use knowledge of spelling rules and patterns, a variety of resources, and appropriate strategies to recognize and correct their own and others’ spelling errors (e.g., spell correctly specific historical, academic, and literary terms used in course materials; relate spelling patterns to word origin and meaning by examining the linguistic roots of words; maintain a list of words with “trick” spellings; use print and electronic spelling resources and knowledge of some international spelling variations to check accuracy and select preferred “Canadian” spellings where appropriate; use understanding of sound-symbol relationships, word structures, word meanings, and generalizations about spelling to identify and correct misspellings)
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B1.3
identify the most important ideas and supporting details in texts, including increasingly complex texts (e.g., flag key passages that reveal character in a text; highlight or make notes about ideas or details that support the author’s thesis; prepare a series of tableaux to represent key events in a story; determine what essential information is conveyed by the captions in a graphic text)
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