Style Sheet for WPI Humanities & Arts Courses

The "Style Sheet" is concerned mainly with techniques of documentation. Students with questions or problems concerning basic grammar should ask the instructor, or consult a college dictionary or grammar handbook.

For all Papers submitted in WPI Humanities & Arts courses, the normal courtesy of an authorial proofreading is assumed. Papers riddled with mechanical errors may be returned unread, or failed automatically.

  1. Quotations in Essays. Any word-for-word borrowings of material (ideas, facts, opinions, etc.) should be acknowledged in two ways: by appropriate quotation and by appropriate footnoting.
    1. Short Passages (a phrase up to a few sentences) are placed in quotation marks (").
    2. Long Passages (over 100 words) or verse passages (one line or more) should be indented in your text, without quotation marks (unless, of course, the quoted material itself contains them).
    3. Even if you do not quote directly, but paraphrase or refer indirectly to ideas or opinions advanced in reference material, you must footnote the source. Failure to do so may raise a serious question of plagiarism, and may lead to action before the Campus Judicial system.
  2. Internal Punctuation in Quotations. You must be especially careful to proofread all quoted material to ensure accuracy. Normally, all idiosyncracies of the quotation will be preserved. You must ensure a continuity of your grammar and that of the quoted material.
      Observe the following specific rules:
    1. Periods and commas come within the final quotation mark; all other punctuation marks come outside. "word," "word." But "word";
    2. If you delete some material from a quotation, indicate the deletion with three dots (...) single spaced. If you delete at the end of a sentence, don't forget your period; if you delete at the beginning of a sentence, the dots are unnecessary.
    3. Anything you add to a quotation must be placed in square brackets [], not parentheses.
  3. Footnotes. The standard form conveys the following information in this order: author, title, place of publication, publisher, date, page number(s). An example is William Barrett, Irrational Man (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1962), p. 123. You should follow precisely this format, observing exactly the punctuation of the example.

    Note form for more than one page: pp. 123-25. Remember all footnotes end with a period.

    If you have many quotations to the same book (e.g., you are quoting from a novel), give the full form only the first time and add a note that all future quotes are from the same text and will be cited in parentheses immediately following the quoted matter.

    The term "Ibid." means "in the same place," and should be used if the second of two references is to the preceding author and book.

    Example (footnote #1 was full form of Barrett's book):

    Ibid., p. 124. (If second reference is to p. 123, no page reference appears: Ibid.)

    If a subsequent reference is to Barrett, don't repeat the full form; use:

    Barrett, p. 127. If more than one work by Barrett is cited, use Barrett, Irrational Man, p. 127.

    The footnote form for a journal entry is John Eliot, "Vergil and King John," English Language Notes, 2 (1964), 90-92.

  4. Bibliography. You need not supply a bibliography for a short paper if you have also given a list of footnotes. On the other hand, if you want to show general, rather than specific indebtedness, use a bibliography, rather than footnotes. The standard bibliographical reference form in literature is slightly different from the footnote form:

    Barrett, William. Irrational Man. Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor, 1962.

  5. Common Errors.
    1. Effect vs. affect..
      Effect = result (noun) or accomplish (verb). Affect = influence (verb); rarely used as a noun.
    2. Like vs. as.
      Briefly, 'like' is a preposition; "as" is a conjunction. Therefore, don't use "like" to introduce a clause (group of words containing a verb).
    3. Its vs. it's.
      Its - possessive (cf. his, hers); it's = it is.
    4. Semicolon. Use a semicolon (not a comma) to join together two sentences (each containing a complete subject and verb); use a comma to link unequal, grammatical units, like dependent and independent clauses. (Note use of semi-colon and comma in the preceding sentence.)

NOTE: Students are encouraged to discuss the format for their papers with their instructor.

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Last modified: January 24, 2007 17:44:14