Page 131 - Aldi Lukman Nurhakim_How to Write Critical Esays: A Guide for Students of Literature

130 How to write critical essays
extracts on the page, you may seem ignorant of, or careless
about, the formalities of literary criticism. But if you misquote,
you will sound casual about literature itself. At worst, your
reader may begin to wonder whether you are interested in
discovering and expressing the truth.
There are two different formats by which to indicate that
you are ceasing to write your own prose and are now
reproducing an extract from a text. One is for a brief quotation:
no more than twenty words of prose or two complete lines of
verse. The other is for more substantial extracts.
Shorter quotations should be distinguished from your own
prose simply by being enclosed in single quotation marks. In
extracts from poems, line endings must be identified by an
oblique stroke:
Byron’s journals suggest impatience with modern poetry.
Keats’s verse, for instance, is disdained as ‘a sort of mental
masturbation’ (Letters and Journals, Vol. VII, p. 225).
Wordsworth, however, is a less dismissible enigma: a
‘stupendous genius’ if also a ‘damned fool’ (Vol. V, p. 13).
In Childe Harolde, Byron himself tries out a
Wordsworthian pantheism: ‘Are not the mountains, waves
and skies, a part/Of me…?’ (Canto III, stanza 75). The
question, however, may not be merely rhetorical. The
Alpine landscape, only a few stanzas earlier, has been said
‘to show/How earth may pierce to Heaven, yet leave vain
man below’ (III, 62).
A longer quotation is set clearly apart from your own
sentences. The correct layout is that which I have just used
above in quoting from an essay on Byron. The sentence
which introduces the quotation should end in a colon. Then
your pen should move down to a new line and write the first
word of the quotation at least one inch further to the right
than the margin you are using for your own prose. Every
ensuing line of the quotation should be indented to this same
extent. Each line should also end earlier than lines of your
own prose. The quotation is thus framed by additional
margins on both sides. Note that the first line of the above
extract is no more indented than those that follow. This
signals that the quotation does not begin at the point where
the original text starts a new paragraph. Had I written the