Page 136 - Aldi Lukman Nurhakim_How to Write Critical Esays: A Guide for Students of Literature

Presentation 135
some weekly journal like The Times Literary Supplement, can
the right issue be sought immediately or must a whole shelf of
back-numbers be searched? Have you been considerate enough
to specify on which page of the relevant week’s issue the article
begins?
Provided that your bibliography is both comprehensive and
comprehensible, your tutor will not mind too much about its
detailed format. However, as the agreed conventions are easy
enough, you may as well take a professional pride in learning
them. For books, the entry should list the following items in this
order:
1) The author’s surname.
2) The author’s forename or initials. Neither name should be
underlined. The exception is where the book is the text of
an established writer’s literary works. If the title of the
book includes that writer’s name, ignore items 1 and 2
above, beginning the entry in your bibliography with the
title: The Complete Poetical Works of Shelley or
Coleridge’s Verse: A Selection. You then proceed with item
4 below and so on.
3) The work’s full title. Here, as elsewhere, this must be
underlined.
4) Where applicable, the name of the editor(s) or translator(s)
preceded by ‘ed.’ or ‘trans.’.
5) Where applicable, the number of volumes into which the
work is divided for ease of printing and handling. Thus
items 3, 4 and 5 could be: The Poetical Works of William
Wordsworth, ed. E. de Selincourt and Helen Darbishire (5
vols).
6) The place and date of publication. Optionally, the name of
the publisher can be included: either before, or in between,
these two.
Conventions as to what punctuation should appear between
these items vary. Your tutor will not object to full stops,
commas, semi-colons or even brackets provided that their
positioning does not reduce clarity. Equally adequate versions
are:
Hammond, Gerald, The Reader and Shakespeare’s Young Man
Sonnets, London, 1981.