The most important aspect of your work is always the quality of your research, understanding, and thinking, but clear presentation tends to go along with clear and intelligent thinking.

This guide is for the use of all students studying English Language and Linguistics modules in the School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics (SELLL), and it sets out the conventions that you must follow in presenting your written work. The main focus is on referencing and formatting, which are vital to the integrity of your writing.

Within the school, two styles are prescribed: one for work in language and linguistics (outlined in this guide), and one for work in literature. Students working across both disciplines (e.g. Language and Literature students) need to familiarise themselves with both sets of conventions, and use the style appropriate for each module. If you're unsure of which style to use for a particular assignment, check in with your module leader.

Using this guide

If you know you're looking for something specific, you can search the guide using the search icon at the top of the page.

You should look through the whole guide carefully especially before preparing your first assignment. The guide is laid out in five sections:

IPA and other symbols

For any essays using IPA symbols (or, indeed, any symbols not commonly used in English orthography), make sure that the symbol you are using actually shows up in the file you hand in.

If you have no Unicode font installed on your machine which has phonetic symbols, you have several options:

It is crucial that you save your file as a PDF file and that you check that the PDF is readable and that all fonts appear as they should before submission. Phonetic symbols that print out as empty boxes will not enhance your mark.

Syntactic Trees

Students should draw syntactic trees with one of the following programmes:

Once created, the syntactic trees must be inserted into Microsoft Word (or an equivalent word processor) as an image.

As with IPA symbols, it is important that you make a PDF of your document and ensure that trees appear correctly before submission.

Source materials need to be referenced at the point where they are introduced. In linguistics, this takes the form of in-text parenthetic references. (Other disciplines, such as literature, use footnotes for references.) Parenthetic in-text referencing is straightforward: you include the author and year of the source in parenthesis near where it is referenced, as illustrated in (7):

(7) In the earliest proposals for variable rules, Labov and others clearly conceived of them as a refinement of the optional rules in contemporary generative theory (Labov 1972: 93-95; Wolfram and Fasold 1974: 99-100). Cedergren and Sankoff argue, ‘[t]he full importance of variable rules can be appreciated only from a certain paradigmatic viewpoint, one which constitutes a slight but distinct shift from generative theory’ (1974: 352).

Content, format & placement

In-text references must contain the following key information:

• last name of author(s);

• year of publication

If the author’s name is part of the prose, only the year of publication (and page numbers) are included in parentheses, as shown in (8). If the author’s name is not part of the prose, their name is also included in parentheses, as shown in (9).

(8) Bybee (2003) argues that frequency is both a contributor to and result of grammaticalization.

(9) Frequency is both a contributor to and result of grammaticalization (Bybee 2003).

Multiple Authors

If the referenced work was written by two authors, both authors are named, as shown in (10).

(10) a. Sandler and Lillo-Martin (2001: 533) posit that ‘[s]ign language research has [...] made a significant contribution to our understanding of human language’. b. ‘Sign language research has [...] made a significant contribution to our understanding of human language’ (Sandler and Lillo-Martin 2001: 533).

If the referenced work was written by three or more authors, only the first author’s name is specified, followed by et al. (which means ‘and others’) in italics, as shown in (11).

(11) a. Sproat et al. (2001) provide a critical overview of the field of computational linguistics. b. Parsing is one of the main areas of inquiry in computational linguistics (see, for example, Sproat et al. 2001: 608-615 for a comprehensive overview).

Page Numbers

When referring to somebody else’s work, page numbers are not provided when reference is made to a theory, argument, or result that spans across a whole article, chapter or book. However, page numbers must be provided with the in-text reference when:

• Quoting directly (verbatim) from the work

• Paraphrasing a specific passage or argument in the work

• Referring to specific statistics, figures, and tables in the work

There are many options for reference management software, and these may be introduced to you as part of your modules. While many professional researchers don't use these, they often already have well-developed personal systems for managing their literature and referencing. However, as you are starting your studies and are unlikely to already have this kind of workflow, it's worth getting started with a reference manager.

What does a reference manager do?

Reference management software can do many things:

1. Allow you to easily add literature to your personal library as you are browsing on the web.

2. Give you a centralised place to store, organise/categorise, search and take structured notes on primary literature. You can maintain this "digital library" throughout your degree.

3. Add in-text references using a plug-in with your word processor, and automatically format these to your desired citation style (including the style outlined in this guide) with a single click.

4. Automatically generate your list of references cited in your writing, properly formatted to your desired style.

Many people only use reference managers when writing (3-4), but its worth noting that you can use these for managing your literature and taking notes (1-2) as well.

What are my options?

Using a reference manager will likely require some independent learning on your part - you will need to look up resources online to figure out how to use it, and may need to troubleshoot issues as you go. It may seem easier to just not bother, but it will pay off over time. You'll build a well-annotated library of sources you can use across modules and assignments, where engagement with the literature is key to your success. Especially when it comes to doing larger pieces of work in your final year, you won't regret having many of the tasks associated with referencing automated.

How do I use a reference manager with this guide?

In many fields of linguistics (e.g. sociolinguistics, corpus linguistics, experimental linguistics), results are often presented in tables and figures. They are numbered consecutively and given a caption under the table/figure. Your caption should be descriptive, and is generally presented in a smaller font size than the main text and centred. Figures should have readable text and clearly labelled x and y axes.

Use numbering to refer to tables and figures in the body of your essay (e.g. ‘As shown in Figure 1 below, ...’; ‘Table 1 summarises the results of the survey.’). The first reference to a figure or table should occur near where the table or figure is placed in text.

If you’ve reproduced the table from an existing study, you need to mention the source, as shown in the example below.

Identifying Sources

Literature searches will unearth a plethora of resources on any given topic. An important step in identifying suitable materials is assessing the authority and appropriateness of source materials according to the following criteria:

• Scope: Is the scope of the source too broad or too narrow? Is the source relevant to the variety/period/etc. you’re researching?

• Author: What are the author’s credentials? Is the author an established figure in the field or a self-proclaimed expert?

• Audience: Who is the intended audience for this source? Is the material too technical or too basic?

• Date: Has the source recently been up-dated? Is the source out-dated?

Scholarly articles published in academic journals are written by and for experts, so their content can generally be deemed reliable. Caution must be exercised with internet resources, especially if the author or publication date is not given. In general, try to rely on sources that are simply webpages very sparingly, if at all.

Quoting from, or paraphrasing, lecture materials is strongly discouraged on all modules. Always try and find the original source. Check lecture handouts for references or ask your lecturer for guidance. If you have been given explicit permission to use lecture materials, you must acknowledge them explicitly.

Acknowledging Sources

All sources must be fully and accurately acknowledged in your written work. Full and accurate acknowledgement of sources is essential so that we know what ideas are your own, and where you are drawing on other sources. Sloppy acknowledgement may actually lead your reader to miss when you make a novel contribution.

Paraphrasing

A paraphrase does not require quotation marks if it is in your own words, but you must still give a reference in-text to the original source, and include the full source in your List of References. You may also include a page number if it's possible to pinpoint exactly what you are paraphrasing (e.g., if this spans only a couple pages and not an entire chapter).

Direct quotations

Direct quotations should be used sparingly and reserved for instances where the exact wording used in the source material is important. In general, it is preferable to paraphrase rather than quote source materials.

If you decide it's important to quote directly (verbatim) from a source, you must:

• Reference the work in-text at the point where the quote appears.

• Provide a page number so the reader can find the quote in context if they wish.

• Include the full source at the end of your essay in the list of references.

Linguistic Expressions: Use and Mention

In a linguistics essay, it is particularly important to make a distinction between the expressions you are using in writing your essay and the words or expressions you are writing about (i.e. those you are citing, or mentioning).

When you are mentioning an expression, the expression cited must be typographically distinctive: it should be formatted differently so it stands out. The usual way to do this is by putting it in italics. Thus, when mentioning the prepositional phrase (PP) round the bend, italicise it as exemplified here. Bath is a four-letter word, but Bath is a city in the southwest of England.

If an example is particularly important, if it is a full sentence, or if you are going to refer to it again or compare it with other examples, you should give it a bracketed number and format it apart from your prose: add an empty line above and below, and indent it. For example, an alternative way of citing the sentence These fritters need to be thrown away is as shown in (1):

(1) These fritters need to be thrown away.

You can see another example with appropriate prose below.

Where an example is numbered and formatted away from the prose, it need not be italicised. Thereafter it need only be referred to by its number, for example, "As illustrated in (2), ...". If you use more than one example, they must be consecutively numbered throughout.

Glosses from other languages

Whenever you discuss words or sentences from another language, you will need to make clear their meaning to the reader. If it is just a single word or short phrase, you can make it part of your ordinary text, as shown in (3) below. Italicise it and, immediately following it, supply a translation into English (not in italics, but in quotation marks). An example would be:

(3) In addition to the verb essen 'to eat', German also has a verb fressen 'to devour/to eat like an animal'.

If you want to give an entire sentence, this should be done as a numbered example. like the following in (4) for a Bengali sentence:

The first line gives the Bengali sentence, the second line gives the so-called gloss (i.e. a translation for each separate Bengali word), and the third line gives a translation of the entire sentence. No italics are used, but the third line is in quotation marks. Also note that each source word must be left-aligned with the corresponding gloss, as shown in examples (4)-(6).

This method should also be used if the sentence is not from another language but from an earlier stage of English, and would not be immediately comprehensible to a non-specialist. An example with an Old English sentence is given in (5):

The information in the fourth line of (5) is to identify the text and page that the Old English sentence has been taken from. In this case, the sentence has been taken from an electronic corpus, and the system of referencing of that corpus is used.

In cases where a text is published as a hard copy, a reference might consist of the name of the editor, the year of publication of the edition and the page where the sentence is found, as shown in (6):

The information required for monographs in Lists of References includes the following (in this precise order):

1. author’s last name + COMMA + SPACE

2. capital initial of author’s first name + FULL STOP + SPACE

3. year of publication + FULL STOP + SPACE

4. Title of Publication with capital initials for content words + FULL STOP + SPACE

5. place of publication + COLON + SPACE

6. publisher + FULL STOP

NOTE: For multiple-authored monographs, the names of all authors must be provided (unlike with in-text references where only the first and second authors are mentioned and all others are subsumed under et al.). First and last names are only inverted for the first author; if there are only two authors, they are separated by ‘and’; if there are more than two authors, all but the last two authors are separated by commas.

All written assignments in language and linguistics should have some internal structure.

In general, essays in language and linguistics will have a particular structure. They should have:

• An explicit Title. This may be specified in assignment guidance, or it may be up to you to come up with something descriptive.

• You should begin with an explicit Introduction which minimally tells the reader what to expect.

• You should end with explicit Conclusion, which reminds the reader of key points.

Sections should be labelled and numbered (e.g. 1. Introduction’, ‘5. Conclusion’). Sub-sections should be numbered and formatted so they are visually distinct from the main text, e.g.,

1. Introduction ...

2. Data and methodology

   2.1 Data

   2.2. Methodology

Where you judge it appropriate to use direct quotations, make sure to format them correctly as outlined below.

Short quotations

Direct quotations of fewer than 40 words should be integrated into your writing. The quotation should be part of the author’s prose so that the whole sentence is grammatically coherent, and their beginning and end are marked with single quotation marks, as in (12) below. Note that the closing quotation mark must be placed before the following punctuation mark.

(12) Akita and Dingemanse (2019:1) define ideophones as 'marked words that depict sensory imagery' .

Longer quotations

Direct quotations longer than 40 words are presented in a separate paragraph, as shown in (13) below. To separate the direct quotation from the main body of the text, it must be set off from the main body of the text by:

• Indenting it by equally on the left and right margins (by about 6 mm)

• Using single line-spacing

Note that long, indented quotations are not enclosed in quotation marks. The source needs to be specified, either in the preceding text (e.g. Macaulay (2002: 284) argues that QUOTATION, as with a shorter quote), or else in a separate line at the bottom of the indented paragraph, with author, year of publication and page number in parentheses, as shown in (13).

Long quotations should never be enclosed within a sentence of the author’s main text since it is difficult for a reader to carry on the meaning of the sentence.

Changing a quotation

If the original text to be quoted is modified in any way (e.g. to make it intelligible or to shorten it), this must be indicated with the use of square brackets. The text quoted in (14) appears in the original chapter by Rickford and Eckert (2001) as follows:

(14) Style is a pivotal construct in the study of sociolinguistic variation. Stylistic variability in speech affords us the possibility of observing linguistic change in progress (Labov 1966). Moreover, since all individuals and social groups have stylistic repertoires, the styles in which they are recorded must be taken into account when comparing them (Rickford and McNair-Knox 1994:265). Finally, style is the locus of the individuals' internalization of broader social distributions of variation (Eckert 2000).

In the quotation in (15), the text has been slightly altered:

(15) Rickford and Eckert (2001: 1) posit that ‘[s]tyle is a pivotal construct in the study of sociolinguistic variation [and that] [s]tylistic variability [...] affords us the possibility of observing linguistic change in progress’.

• style and stylistic are spelled with lower case rather than capital ‘s’ because they are no longer used sentence-initially.

• ‘and that’ has been inserted between the first and second sentence of the original text for continuity.

• some text has been omitted from the second sentence of the original text, indicated with an ellipsis in brackets [...].

Because the alterations are inserted in square brackets and ‘[...]’ is used to indicate omissions, readers know immediately not only that the quotation in (15) deviates from the original text but they also know exactly where and how it deviates.

Mistakes in quotes

On rare occasions, the text to be quoted may contain a mistake. If this is the case, ‘[sic]’ is inserted after the mistake to indicate that it occurred in the original text and has not been introduced by you when quoting the original.

(16) Documenting the evolution of what’s more in the history of English, Brinton (2008: 210) notes that ‘[i]n the beginning, {which, what} is more is clause internal and functions as an [sic] relative adjunct adjoined to a phrasal category’.

Secondary Quoting

Secondary quoting is the use of a quotation or argument that is cited in another source. This is how Kamwangamalu (2010: 129) cites Liu et al. in (17) below: Kamwangamalu has read the point from Liu et al. (2005) only in Rubdy (2007) page 322, and not from Liu et al. directly.

(17) In this regard, Liu et al. (2005, cited in Rubdy 2007: 322) argue that in an increasingly globalized world, CS may need to be added as a curriculum objective, a required life skill.

Secondary quoting of this kind should be avoided if at all possible. If you can access the original source, you should do so. If secondary quoting cannot be avoided, you must reference the secondary source (i.e., the one you have read) and the original source (i.e., the one you are quoting). Both sources must be included in your List of References.

All on-line sources must be properly referenced. It is, however, not sufficient to simply supply a URL. A properly referenced on-line source requires inclusion of the following information:

1. author’s last name(s) + COMMA + SPACE

2. capital initial of author’s first name + FULL STOP + SPACE

3. year of publication + FULL STOP + SPACE [NB: If no publication date is provided on the URL, you must insert ‘ND’ (for ‘no date’) in place of the year of publication.]

4. OPENING SINGLE QUOTATION MARK + title of article (all lower case) + CLOSING SINGLE QUOTATION MARK + FULL STOP

5. ‘Last accessed’ + SPACE + the date on which you last accessed the URL + COMMA

6. ‘from’ + COLON + URL + FULL STOP.

Accordingly, when an on-line resource is referred to in an in-text reference, the author and publication must be referenced (e.g., Hudson (2010) argues that ...). If the author is not identified (e.g. with on-line corpora), you should use the title of the site to order the item in your alphabetical list, and refer to the title in the in-text-reference.

Note that you only need to give the URL for materials that are only available on the web. You can often access articles or whole books through websites or electronic archives which are also available in print form, but in those cases you treat them as printed items, using the normal formats, and you don’t need to give the URL. This is because they are not web materials as such, but simply scanned electronic copies from printed volumes.

In addition to providing in-text references, every essay must contain an alphabetical List of References at the end which gathers together all the sources that were referenced in the body of the text (not all the works consulted). This is slightly less straightforward than in-text referencing, as different source materials require slightly different conventions. Therefore it is important that you are clear what sort of publication you are referencing in order to choose the right information and format.

In the Appendix, we have provided a summary of the following conventions. You may wish to keep copies of these summaries close by when you’re working on your essays.

It is important to indicate if a text is a later edition, as these are often considerably revised. If an edition has been revised, ‘Xth ed’ must be inserted (between full stops) between the title of the monograph and the place of publication.

The information required for edited volumes in lists of references includes the following (in this precise order):

1. author’s last name + COMMA + SPACE

2. capital initial of author’s first name + FULL STOP + SPACE

3. ‘(ed.)’ + FULL STOP + SPACE

4. year of publication + FULL STOP + SPACE

5. Title of Publication (in italics, with capital initials for content words) + FULL STOP + SPACE

6. place of publication + COLON + SPACE

7. publisher + FULL STOP

The same rules for multiple authorship apply as for monographs, and ‘(ed.)’ changes to ‘(eds)’ (without full stop).

The information required for chapters in edited volumes includes the following (in this precise order):

1. author’s last name + COMMA + SPACE

2. capital initial of author’s first name + FULL STOP + SPACE

3. year of publication + FULL STOP + SPACE

4. OPENING SINGLE QUOTATION MARK + title of chapter (except for the first word of the title, all in lower case) + CLOSING SINGLE QUOTATION MARK + FULL STOP

5. ‘In’

6. capital initial of editor’s first name + FULL STOP + SPACE

7. editor’s last name + SPACE h. ‘(ed.)’ + SPACE

8. Title of Edited Volume (in italics, with capital initials for content words) + FULL STOP

9. place of publication + COLON + SPACE

10. publisher + FULL STOP

11. start page + HYPHEN + end page + FULL STOP

The same rules for multiple authorship apply as for monographs, and ‘(ed.)’ changes to ‘(eds)’ (without full stop).

You may notice that there is slight variation between different publishers in the way that information is displayed (see the examples below).

What is important, however, is that they are consistent in their use of conventions (e.g. Cambridge University Press and Wiley-Blackwell always put dates of publications in parentheses; John Benjamins never does). For you, too, consistency is the crucial thing, so you should not follow the style of specific publishers but always use the conventions outlined in this guide.

The information required for journal articles includes the following (in this precise order):

1. author’s last name(s) + COMMA + SPACE

2. capital initial of author’s first name + FULL STOP + SPACE

3. year of publication + FULL STOP + SPACE

4. OPENING SINGLE QUOTATION MARK + title of article (lower case except for first word)

5. CLOSING SINGLE QUOTATION MARK + FULL STOP

6. Title of Journal (in italics, with capitals initials for content words)

7. volume number of journal + COLON + SPACE

8. start page + HYPHEN + end page + FULL STOP

The same rules for multiple authorship apply as for monographs.

'Any source' may refer to material which is printed, electronic, another student's work (whether at this university or another), or your own work from another module or assignment. It can also involve module materials, such as lecture slides or transcripts.

Please read the following carefully:

• Purchasing an essay from someone else, or paying them to write it for you, is plagiarism.

• Submitting the same work for different modules is plagiarism — this is known as self-plagiarism.

• Collaborating with a fellow student on writing also constitutes plagiarism, unless team work is explicitly called for in the assignment brief.

• Plagiarism is not necessarily deliberate: it can result from incomplete note-taking, or haste in the final stages of an essay or project.

• You must acknowledge fully not only where you quote verbatim from a source, but also if you paraphrase a source, summarise it, or use its distinctive ideas.

You do not need to provide references for ideas that are widely accepted as matters of fact, or for any information of a general nature. For example, you don’t have to indicate a source when you mention that Shakespeare died in 1616, that Saussure was a Swiss linguist, or that /b/ is a voiced bilabial plosive.

Preventing plagiarism

When preparing your written assignments, follow this style guide carefully: this guidance is designed in part to help you avoid plagiarism. Here are some additional tips:

• In taking notes, make sure you very clearly distinguish between your source material and your own material. One suggestion would be to use different colour pens, underlining, or other markup in your notes to differentiate between your ideas and those taken from another source.

• Make sure that any notes, photocopies, or electronic files that you keep are fully documented with the name of the author and the source from which they were taken, so that you have this information readily available for your write-up.

• Never import material from an electronic source into your drafts with the intention of modifying it, or attempt to make an essay out of a patchwork of material from electronic or printed sources that you have lightly modified. Even if you acknowledge the sources it will be a very poor essay, and if you do not, it will constitute plagiarism.

• Insert your references and compile your List of References as you draft your essay; don't try to do this all at the end. A reference manager will help with this.

• Some plagiarism comes about because of last-minute panic, so organise your time well. Don’t be tempted to plagiarise because of difficult circumstances!

For some coursework, you may need to work with and reference the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) Online. How you reference the OED depends on when the entry you refer to was added to the OED. There are two main options, exemplified with the entry for innit below. The first definition of innit provided is “a vulgar form for isn’t it”. A correct reference of this entry requires inclusion of the following information:

1. OPENING SINGLE QUOATION MARK + specific entry (i.e., the word you looked up in the OED) + CLOSING SINGLE QUOTATION MARK + FULL STOP + SPACE

2. The Oxford English Dictionary (in italics, with capitals initials for content words) + FULL STOP + SPACE

3. edition and year + FULL STOP + SPACE

4. OED Online (in italics, with capitals for content words) + FULL STOP + SPACE

5. the month & year on which this definition was added to the online version of the OED + FULL STOP + SPACE

6. Oxford University Press + FULL STOP + SPACE g. ‘Last accessed’ + SPACE + the date on which you last accessed the URL + COMMA h. ‘from’ + COLON + URL + FULL STOP.

However, the way innit is used has changed quite rapidly since the second edition of the OED was published in 1989. This is reflected in the on-line version. As shown below, a new definition for innit was added in July 2009. This is only a draft addition, though, which must be reflected in how this entry is referenced:

1. OPENING SINGLE QUOATION MARK + specific entry (i.e., the word you looked up in the OED) + CLOSING SINGLE QUOTATION MARK + FULL STOP + SPACE

2. OED Online (in italics, with capitals initials for content words) + FULL STOP + SPACE

3. edition and year + FULL STOP + SPACE

4. OED Online (in italics, with capitals for content words) + FULL STOP + SPACE

5. Oxford Universith Press + FULL STOP + SPACE

6. ‘Last accessed’ + SPACE + the date on which you last accessed the URL + COMMA

7. ‘from’ + COLON + URL + FULL STOP.

The reason why you need different conventions for the two entries is that the first entry also appears in the print version of the OED published in 1989, while the second one only appears in the current on-line version of the OED. This information is important for an interested reader.

If you have collected a lot of data from the OED, then do not give a reference for each word individually, the way it is done for innit above. Instead, at the point in your essay where you describe the sources of your data, make clear that you have collected it from the OED. At later points in your essay, whenever there is a need to remind the reader that you are discussing data collected from the OED, add the following after the relevant sentence:

(data from OED)

In the list of references, include one entry for the OED as a whole, which should take the following form:

Whether or not references are correct depends on the author’s ability to find the information to be included in them. This is pretty straightforward. Imagine you want to reference the following monograph:

The front page gives the title (Syntactic Theory and the Structure of English), the subtitle (A Minimalist Approach), and the name of the author (Andrew Radford). One of the first pages inside the book (an even page, i.e., on the left) looks like this:

For illustrative purposes, the preceding sections have separated different types of publications (monographs, edited volumes, etc.). No such distinctions are made in Lists of References at the end of essays, books or articles. All sources, irrespective of their nature, must be organised alphabetically into a single list without bullet points. If more than one work by the same author is referenced, they should be listed in chronological order (oldest > newest). When a single entry is longer than one line, the second line is usually indented by 1.25mm, as illustrated in the following extract taken from Bruyn’s (2009) List of References.