MLA style essay assginment

Essay 2 Guidelines

Never summarize the work of literature you are responding to. You are analyzing/critiquing a work of literature, not telling your reader the story.
Always consider your audience: never abbreviate in a formal essay.
Never cite from the text in the introduction or the conclusion.
Always mention the title of the work and the author’s name in the introduction – it can even be a part of the thesis statement. Thereafter, when using textual support, you can just use the last name of the author.
You must come up with an original title for your essay.
is always discussed in the present tense unless you are referencing an action happening in the past.
Essay 2 will be graded harder than Essay 1. Essay 1 was graded primarily on content. You must meet all of the criteria of the assignment – so make sure you understand what essay form, MLA style, and MLA citation for prose is, etc. Your last paper used poetry citation style, so don’t use that for this paper.
If you have bought the Rules for Writers book, then you are in good shape to produce an “A” level essay. If you didn’t, you can possibility still figure things out by making an appointment on line with the virtual Writing Center, or reviewing the information below.
If you do make an appointment with the Writing Center, don’t forget you must check in by email for your Writing Center appointment fifteen minutes before your session time at [email protected].

Proper MLA in-text citation style

This is called the signal phrase, and this is how you should introduce your quoted textual support. The purpose of the signal phrase is to make it clear to the reader who is saying what.

For example: Austen states, “____________” (50). Notice there is no punctuation at the end of the sentence from the quote except for exclamation points and question marks. If you are using a quote within a quote, it should be set-up like this: Austen says, “It was a dreary day when Mr. Wickham said, ‘Let’s go for a stroll by the river’” (42).

Grammar/MLA Style

Go to the LaGuardia Website and click on Library
Then, on the drop-down menu, choose Help. Then go to Citations, then MLA Style (8th Edition).
Under Tools choose Sample Paper. This will show you the MLA format, which you should incorporate in your paper.
To get a uniformly double-spaced essay (meaning there should be no extra lines between paragraphs, etc.), highlight your paper and right-click. Choose “paragraph,” and under “paragraph” choose “spacing.” You should make sure “before” and “after” is “0” and that the line spacing is set to “Double.”

Another useful site for essay writing:

Google: “Purdue Online Writing Lab” for help with any issues regarding essay writing and grammar.

The most common issues I found in your essays were:

1. Any paper that has a lower-case “i” as a pronoun will be downgraded one full grade. It is unacceptable on the college level to use a lowercase “i” for a pronoun.
2. Articles, pronouns, and verbs.

Articles (a, an, the) always precede a noun: A noun is a person, place or thing.
If there is any confusion with “a” or “an” usage, use “an” when the next word begins with a vowel.

Most common verb error: Has/Have
Use “has” with singular forms: She (singular) has a really nice car.
Use “have” with plural forms: They (plural) have to go to the gym at least twice a week.

Besides the lowercase “i”, the most common pronoun error is with:
“woman” “women”: A woman is one female. Women denotes two or more females.
Same with man/men.