Page 129 - Aldi Lukman Nurhakim_How to Write Critical Esays: A Guide for Students of Literature

128 How to write critical essays
a page so that the tutor can easily offer as much constructive
advice as time allows.

Titles of literary works

The title of any published book should be underlined. This is
the hand-written equivalent of the printer’s italics. So what you
must write out as The Mill on the Floss, a printed essay would
present as The Mill on the Floss. The rule applies not only to
novels but also to any play, any work of discursive prose, any
long poem or collection of shorter ones which, on its first
publication, constituted a single, printed book.
Where a shorter work first appeared along with others as
only one component of a volume, its title should not be
underlined. Instead, it should be placed in single quotation
marks. So the title of Blake’s song about London is
distinguished from the name of the city itself by being written
as ‘London’. In this case, the title which you should underline is
Songs of Experience, the collection of poems among which
‘London’ was first printed.
Failure to underline the title of a major work can seriously
mislead. Where you write of Hamlet or Robinson Crusoe or
Don Juan, your reader must assume you to mean that
fictional character. Only when underlined as Hamlet,
Robinson Crusoe and Don Juan will they be seen as referring
to entire texts.
Place names too can confuse. If you mention Middlemarch,
your reader will think that you mean the town in which George
Eliot sets her novel. The novel itself is written as Middlemarch.
So, too, Wuthering Heights and Bleak House are the names of
houses. The texts which describe those houses are called
Wuthering Heights and Bleak House.
To avoid confusion with underlined titles, you must not
underline any of your own words or phrases for emphasis.
Instead, indicate which should carry most weight by redesigning
the syntax of your sentence.
For similar reasons, only the title of a short work or an
actual quotation should be enclosed in quotation marks. These
must not be used to apologize for any of your own terminology.
If you are in doubt as to whether a word that you want to