Essay Tips: Personal Pronouns and MLA Formatting

I was impressed with the subtantive drafts that students brought to class today. Hopefully you received some useful feedback from your peers. Remember that writing is a process, we are not born good writers or bad writers, we have to practice to improve our skill.

A few important reminders as you work to your final drafts due between October 1-5:

Eliminate personal pronouns like I or You.

Academic writing requires essays to be written in third person, so the second person voice of you cannot be used. When reading you, readers replace their name for that word, which often confuses the sentence.

Also, there is no need to say "I think" or "I believe". Saying "I think" is redundant and actually undercuts the strength of your ideas. Simply assert your ideas in a declarative statement and the reader will obviously know that you think this. Also all of those "I think" statements are like dead wood floating on the surface of a river. They simply impede ( or get in the way) of the flow of ideas.

MLA Formatting - Pay attention to the details.

EHS follows the citation and formatting rules of The Modern Language Association (MLA).To format MLA papers correctly make sure that you double space throughout the paper, have 1-inch margins, and use Times New Roman 12-point font.

MLA papers also have a header on each page with the student's last name and page number flush right. To add a header in Word, go to View Header and Footer. The Header box will appear on the top of the page, and you can align right your name and use the insert page number [#] icon.

In-text citations for MLA papers look like this after each direct quotation:

"Blah, blah, blah, quotation, blah" (Lahiri 23).

Be exact. The period only goes after the ending parenthesis. There are no commas between the author's last name and the page number.

The book title should be written in italics, as in The Namesake.

MLA also requires a Works Cited page to correspond to your MLA in-text citations. For this first paper, you should only have one citation, The Namesake, because you are using only your brain and no outside research from the Internet, etc. on your topic.The Works Cited page is technically its own page. However, for this essay assignment, you may type your works cited entry at the end of your essay to save a piece of paper. Here's the works cited entry.

Lahiri, Jhumpa. The Namesake. New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 2003.

Use the hanging indent feature under paragraph formatting in Word so that the second line of each works cited entry is indented five spaces. Works cited entries are also double spaced.

Phew. Attending to the details does make a difference in the overall presentation of your paper.