Chinese Literature: Pre-Qin to Tang
EAS 256H
Final Essay Style
Regardless of the citation style. you choose, include a title page at the beginning of your essay, with the title of your essay, the date, the course #, your name and student #, and the word count for your essay (not including footnotes and bibliography). I have asked you to restrict yourself to two secondary sources (by modern scholars), but you may refer briefly to other primary sources (written in premodern China) if they help you to make your argument about the main primary sources you are addressing in your essay. These other primary sources must be cited properly (either from the Owen anthology, or wherever else you accessed them), and must be quoted in English translation. Your essay should be a minimum of 2,000 words, which is roughly 4 pages, single-spaced, 12pt font, 1” margins.
For your essay, you may use any documentation style. with which you are familiar, but it must be a standard style. accepted for academic writing (MLA, Chicago, APA), and you must follow it consistently. The guidelines presented here are consistent with advice given in The Chicago Manual of Style, 17th ed. on the “notes and bibliography” style of citation (link). You can find out more about different citation styles, and online tools to generate proper citations at this link.
Footnotes:
In Chicago style, superscript. numbers in the text of the essay refer readers to notes with corresponding numbers at the foot of the page (footnotes). The first time you cite a source, include the full information. See the link to the Chicago Manual for examples of how to cite books, chapters, journal articles, lectures, websites, etc. (You may have to scroll down to find an appropriate example.) If you are citing a print book, chapter, or article that you accessed online, then just cite it as a print work (no need to include the web address). If you are citing an online source that is only available via a website, then cite it as a website.
What follows is a summary of the Chicago style, but refer to the online manual itself for more detailed information before asking me or a TA for clarification. Pay special attention to when titles should be italicized (book and journal titles), and when they should be in “quotation marks” (chapters, articles, lectures, websites, etc.).
Example of citing a book, such as the Owen anthology, for the first time:
1. Stephen Owen, An Anthology ofChinese Literature: Beginnings to 1911 (New York: Norton, 1996), 289.
If you cite the same source (regardless of type) later in your essay, use a shortened form, with the author’s surname and one significant word from the title:
6. Owen, Anthology, 311.
If you use the same text again for your very next citation, you should use “Ibid.” which means the same information as above. For example, if your second footnote is for the same source and same page it will look like this:
2. Ibid.
If you use a different page, it would look like this (pay close attention to the period and comma):
2. Ibid., 292.
For a chapter in a book edited by someone else, use the following format:
1. Henry David Thoreau, “Walking,” in The Making of the American Essay, ed. John D’Agata (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2016), 177–78.
For lectures, use the following format (cite the lecture dates on the syllabus, not when they were posted, or when you listened to them):
1. Graham Sanders, “Mid-Tang Poetry” (Lecture for EAS256H Chinese Literature:
Pre-qin to Tang, University of Toronto, June 5, 2020).
For journal articles, use the following format:
1. T. H. Breen, “Will American Consumers Buy a Second American Revolution?,” Journal ofAmerican History 93, no. 2 (2006): 405.
For websites, use the following format (you can leave out the author name if it is not noted):
3. George P. Landow, “Victorian and Victorianism,” Victorian Web, accessed June 9, 2020, http:// victorianweb.org/vn/victor4.html.
Bibliography:
The bibliography begins on a new page at the end of the essay, giving full publication information for all the works cited in the notes. The bibliography should be listed alphabetically by author’s last name, so the formatting is somewhat different from notes. (Note the different uses of periods, commas, parentheses, and that the second line of an entry is indented to make it easier to see each entry separately.)
Examples using the sources cited above:
Breen, T. H. “Will American Consumers Buy a Second American Revolution?” Journal ofAmerican History 93, no. 2 (2006): 404-8.
Landow, George P. “Victorian and Victorianism.” Victorian Web. Accessed June 9, 2020.
http://victorianweb.org/vn/victor4.html.
Owen, Stephen. An Anthology of Chinese Literature: Beginnings to 1911. New York:
W.W. Norton & Company, 1996.
Sanders, Graham. “Mid-Tang Poetry.” Lecture for EAS256H Chinese Literature: Pre-qin to Tang, University of Toronto, June 5, 2020.
Thoreau, Henry David. “Walking.” In The Making of the American Essay, edited by John D’Agata, 167–95. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2016.
Somethings to remember for quotations and citations:
All words that are not your own—whether they are from the textbook, a lecture, a book, journal article, website, or even a discussion with a classmate—must be in quotation marks, and followed by a footnote.
All ideas that are not your own, but you have paraphrased in your own words, do not need quotation marks, but do still need a footnote.
Use “double quotation marks” in your essay when quoting from a source. Use ‘single quotation marks’ when there is a quotation in the text you are quoting. For example:
“And then she said, ‘proper citations are important’, at the end of the handout.”
If you skip over words from a source for brevity, replace them with three periods “ …”
(called an ellipsis), but do not skip words if they substantially change the meaning of the quotation.
For more detailed information on how to quote and paraphrase sources, and to avoid plagiarism, see the following University of Toronto website on Writing Advice (link).