Literary Analysis Essay (Fiction) Rough Draft

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ENGL ####
Date or Semester
Farmer
Title
This is where you will start your essay. In order to fill space and show you more paragraphs, I will include the text of David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. The novel begins in a really rudimentary, almost amusing, way, “Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record that I was born.” Do you see how I had some context to my quote? I didn’t just “drop” the quote on the page. Before giving you the quote, I let you know that I found the text rudimentary and amusing.
What’s more, do you see that there is a comma before the quote? Do you see that the period goes inside of the quotation marks at the end of the quote? Now, if you had a citation, that would be different. I’ll show you that in a minute. Now, I will point out the spacing and indenting. Do you see how all of the spaces between all of the lines and paragraphs, including my header and title, are entirely uniform?
Here, let me show you how to do a longer quote from the same novel. This will show you that even with a “block quote” all of the spaces are uniform. Note that here I do not need quotation marks, the fact that the quote is indented signals it as quoted material But be aware. A block quote is only and always used for quotes that take up three or more lines of text. It will look like this:
In consideration of the day and hour of my birth, it was declared by the nurse, and by some sage women in the neighbourhood who had taken a lively interest in me several months before there was any possibility of our becoming personally acquainted, first, that I was destined to be unlucky in life; and secondly, that I was privileged to see ghosts and spirits; both these gifts inevitably attaching, as they believed, to all unlucky infants of either gender, born towards the small hours on a Friday night.
When I go back to my original writing, I go back to the left margin, even if it is just for one line.
You will not see this, because I have fixed it. However, when I originally typed this example, the block quote that begins, “In consideration,” jumped to the top of page two (rather than appearing at the bottom of page one) because of a feature called “widow/orphan control.” This feature keeps single lines from appearing at the beginning or end of your pages. Unfortunately, it also messes up your margins. You will go to the Home tab and pull down the paragraph dialogue box and click the Line and Page Breaks tab. Here you will untick the widow/orphan control box.
Here’s an example of punctuating a quote with a citation, “I need say nothing here, on the first head, because nothing can show better than my history whether that prediction was verified or falsified by the result” (Dickens, Charles. David Copperfield. New York :Modern Library, 2000). Now the period goes outside the citation rather than inside the quotation marks. This is because the citation is part of the sentence.
Finally, do you see how my page number appears? It has been typed (and formatted) in the header feature. I did not, however, type the header with my name and course information in the header field. Just my name and page number. The page number has been generated by using the page number feature on the Insert tab.

Feel free to download this document and use it as a template for writing your essays so that your papers are always formatted correctly.