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Conventions that Can Cause Problems

Tenses » Titles » Names

A mastery of basic mechanics and writing conventions is essential to convincing your readers that you are a knowledgeable and careful writer whose ideas they should respect. This section explores three conventions that are especially crucial to essays about literature.

Tenses

Essays about literature tend to function almost wholly in the present tense, a practice that can take some getting used to. The rationale is that the action within any literary work never stops: a text simply, always is. Thus yesterday, today, and tomorrow, Ophelia goes mad; "The Lost World" asks what it means to grow up; Wordsworth sees nature as an avenue to God; and so on. When in doubt, stick to the present tense when writing about literature.

An important exception to this general rule is demonstrated in the following example. As you read the excerpt, pay attention to the way the writer shifts between tenses, using various past tenses to refer to completed actions that took place in the actual past, and using the present tense to refer to actions that occur within, or are performed by, the text.

In 1959 Plath did not consciously attempt to write in the domestic poem genre, perhaps because she was not yet ready to assume her majority. Her journal entries of that period bristle with an impatience at herself that may derive from this reluc-tance....But by fall 1962, when she had already lost so much, she was ready.... In "Daddy" she achieved her victory in two ways. First,...she symbolically assaults a father figure who is identified with male control of language.
—Steven Gould Axelrod, "Jealous Gods" (ch. 25)

Titles

Underline or italicize the titles of all books and works published independently, including:

• long poems (Endymion; Paradise Lost)
  
  
• plays (A Midsummer Night’s Dream; Death and the King’s Horseman)
  
  
• periodicals: newspapers, magazines, scholarly journals, and the like (New York Times; College English)

Use quotation marks for the titles of works that have been published as part of longer works, including:

• short stories ("A Rose for Emily"; "Happy Endings")
  
  
• essays and periodical articles ("A Rose for ‘A Rose for Emily’ "; "Art and Ideology in Far from the Madding Crowd")
  
  
• poems ("Daddy"; "Ode to a Nightingale")

Generally speaking, you should capitalize the first word of every title, as well as all the other words that aren’t either articles (e.g., the, a); prepositions (e.g., among, in, through); or conjunctions (e.g., and, but). One exception to this rule is the poem in which the first line substitutes for a missing title (a category that includes everything by Emily Dickinson, as well as the sonnets of Shakespeare and Edna St. Vincent Millay). In such cases, only the first word is capitalized. Often, the entire phrase is placed in brackets—as in "[Let me not to the marriage of true minds]"—but you will just as often see such titles without brackets.

Names

When first referring to an author, use his or her full name; thereafter, use the last name. (For example, although you may feel a real kinship with Robert Frost, you will appear disrespectful if you refer to him as Robert.)

With characters’ names, use the literary work as a guide. Because "Bartleby, the Scrivener" always refers to its characters as Bartleby, Turkey, and Nippers, so should you. But because "The Management of Grief" refers to Judith Templeton either by her full name or by her first name, it would be odd and confusing to call her Templeton.

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