STYLE SHEET

Titles of Works
Titles of novels, plays, films, longer poems published as works in their own right, critical
books, collections of short stories or poems, and television series are presented in italics
(e.g., Thomas Hardy‘s Jude the Obscure, Shakespeare‘s King Lear, Byron‘s Don Juan,
Terry Eagleton‘s Against the Grain, Arthur Conan Doyle‘s The Adventures of Sherlock
Holmes, Seamus Heaney‘s Station Island).
Titles of shorter poems, short stories, essays and television episodes are presented in
single quotation marks (Hardy‘s ‗The Darkling Thrush‘, Conan Doyle‘s ‗A Case of
Identity‘, Terry Eagleton‘s ‗The Critic as Clown‘).
See section 6.4 of the MHRA Style Guide.
References
A reference is an acknowledgement of the source either of quotations written by another
person or of ideas from another person which you have used in your essay. References
are important for three reasons. First, they demonstrate where you are getting the
evidence for your statements, thus showing the good research you have done for your
essay. Second, they enable your reader to find the quotation in the original source text if
he or she so wishes. Third, you will avoid accusations of plagiarism (passing off the
work of another author as your own), which is a serious academic offence.
References should be placed in either a footnote (our preference) or an endnote and
should include the page(s) from which the idea or quotation is taken. References should
be numbered consecutively throughout the essay in Arabic numerals (1, 2, 3). The note
number can be placed at the end of the sentence where it will disrupt your reading least,
or immediately after the quotation. Sometimes it is a good idea to group references into
a single note rather than have a rash of note numbers over a series of sentences. Put
the reference after the last of a group of references (where no original material
intervenes); the ‗cluster‘ should not, however, run over into another paragraph.
What information may need to be included?
The commonest form you will need for a full-length work is:
Author, Title, ed. by (editor‘s name) [where relevant] (Place of publication: Publisher,
Date of Publication), page number(s).
This information will usually be found on the title page of the book you are citing. For
example: Michael Greaney, Conrad, Language and Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2002), pp. 101-2.
Short stories or short poems or essays should be laid out as follows:
Author, ‗Title of Work‘, in Title of Book, ed. by (editor‘s name) [where relevant], edition
[where relevant] (Place of publication: Publisher, Date of Publication), page number(s).
For example: John Keats, ‗Ode to a Nightingale‘, in The Norton Anthology of Poetry, ed.
by Margaret Ferguson, Mary Jo Salter and Jon Stallworthy, 4 th edition (New York:
Norton, 1996), pp. 845-7.