Essay Presentation Rules

Presenting Your Essays

• Present your essay or homework in as tidy and well-organized a way as you can. 
• When word-processing, double-space your text and use wide margins so that your teachers have space to comment. 
• The text should be printed clearly in black (except where colour is needed for illustrations). 
• Choose a font size of 12-13 points, and avoid san-serif fonts (Univers, Arial, Helvetica etc.) since these are hard to read in large blocks of text; serif fonts (such as Times Roman) are more readable in bulk. 
• Use italics only for occasional emphasis and for the titles of books, journals, newspapers, television programmes etc. 
• Do not use underlining (an old typewriter convention). Check that you have indented long quotations (and dropped the inverted commas for these). 
• Check that you have included the author, date of publication and page numbers immediately after quotations in the main body of the text and full references/bibliography at the end. And check that you have included your alphabetical list of references, in the preferred form, at the end (see below).
• The essay pages should all be numbered. Do not forget to put at the top of the essay your name, the date and your teacher’s name. 
• Copy-edit your text (e.g. for spelling, grammar and style) as carefully as is expected for published work. 
• Essays should be submitted before or on the deadline to the teacher in a transparent folder or sleeve (for protection) but don't slow up marking by putting each separate sheet of your essay into a transparent cover.

Reference Formats

In-text references to sources should be at the end of sentences in this form: (Smith 1990: 25-9), omitting page numbers when the reference is to on-line sources. Note the avoidance of 'page', 'p.' or 'pp.' here.
You are normally expected to include a list of references at the end of your text. These are works actually cited in the main body of the text (unlike a bibliography). All of the in-text citations must appear in this list. Follow the following format closely unless otherwise specified (noting in particular that the titles of books and journals should always be in italics). The list of references should appear at the end of the paper in alphabetical order as below.


References



• Brown, Mac H, Patsy Skeen & D Keith Osborn (1979): ‘Young Children’s Perception of the Reality of Television’, Contemporary Education50(3): 129-33
• Chandler, Daniel (1995): 'Children's Understanding of What is "Real" on Television: A Review of the Research Literature' [WWW document]URL http://users.aber.ac.uk/dgc/realrev.html [Date accessed]

From BBC Bitesize http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/gcsebitesize/dida/managing_projects/copyrightrev4.shtml:

Writing a bibliography


A bibliography is a list of all the sources that you used to write your essay. This includes all books, magazines, newspapers, websites, interviews and TV programmes.


There is a standard way of laying them out that you MUST follow. This is:
Author - put the last name first.
Title - this should be underlined and in quotation marks.
Publisher - in a book this is usually located on one of the first few pages.
Date - the date/year the book/article was published.

Put each source on a single line, with a comma between each and a full stop at the end. You should arrange them in alphabetical order of the author's surname. You should also make sure that the list is double-spaced.

Use the example below as a guide:

Bibliography
Books
Gibson, Rex and Andrews, Richard, ‘Cambridge School Shakespeare: As You Like It’, Cambridge University Press, 2009.


Beard, Alan and Kent, Alan, ‘AQA English Literature B AS’, Nelson Thornes, 2012.


Bleima, Sarchet and Webster, ‘Dramatic Genres: Studying Comedy’, English and Media Centre, 2012.


‘Sparknotes: No Fear Shakespeare’, Spark Publishing, 2004.


Website http://www.rsc.org.uk/explore/shakespeare/plays/as-you-like-it/, November 2014.