December 2014Mina Karavanta5th Semester

Revision: Points to Consider When You Write & Errors to Avoid

Sources: Your papers & some of the key points made in The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr. & E.B.White.

1. Incomplete Sentences (Main Clause Missing)

“Despite the slightest hint of kinship with the european mind frightens him.”

“For Florens, to be an orphan means to have been deprived of maternal love, care and af-fection. Whereas Sorrow did not add a philosophical dimension to her suffering.”

“Lina repeats the violence she has undergone. Initiating thus a process of exclusion that pushes Sorrow to the margins of the community life.]

2. Separate subject from verb with a comma.

“Afterwards, Rebekka Vaark, sends her to find the blacksmith in hopes of saving her from the illness that her her husband to death.”

“Sorrow in opposition to the distressed state of Florens, puts aside all her personal prob-lems thanks to the birth of her daughter.”

3. Convoluted sentence (too many points in one) and inappropriate diction.

“Conrad’s systematic exotification of the African tribe undermines the doctrine of biological determinism and is an attempt a vignette of the African culture through aesthetics.”

Or

“Florens is the principal narrator, a constellation of serial confessions or deeply personal realities, shown through the various facets of everyone involved on the estate, the first rep-resentatives of reconstructive expropriated narratives that come to unite a highly diversi-fied and wild America.”

[Conrad’s systematic exotification of the African people draw on the doctrine of biological determinism, which constitutes the scientific roots of racism. His text also represents African life and culture in an aesthetic context that is politically troublesome.]

3. The participial phrase at the beginning of the sentence must refer to the grammati-cal subject.

“Young and inexperienced, the task seemed easy to me.”

[Young and inexperienced, I thought the task easy.]

“On arriving in New York, his friends met him at the station.]

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[On arriving in New York, he was met at the station by his friends.]

“Wondering irresolutely what to do next, the clock struck twelve.”

4. Do not join independent clauses with a comma. Do not use a hyphen to connect sen-tences.

“Achebe stresses the racism of Conrad’s text, he condemns him both as an author and a person while displaying evidence of his ambiguous aesthetics and politics in both his liter-ary texts and letters.”

5. Keep relating words together. The subject of a sentence and the principal verb should not, as a rule, be separated by a phrase or clause that can be transferred to the beginning. Avoid the overuse of parenthetical sentences and place them in commas, and not hyphens, where necessary.

“Toni Morrison, in Beloved, writes about characters who have escaped from slavery but are haunted by its heritage.”

[In Beloved, Toni Morrison writes about characters who have escaped from slavery but are haunted by its heritage.]

6. Use definite, specific, concrete language.

“The Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad offers, according to Achebe, an epitome ground upon which certain prejudices can thrive, undermining and assaulting the people of Africa.”

[According to Achebe, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness affords space to the dissemina-tion and consolidation of racist views on Africa and its people.”

“Moreover, Achebe becomes very critical against Conrad’s supporters for covering these racist ideas that want Africa as an alien uncivilized worlds with just creatures that resemble the human race and which lead to social disintegration that bifurcate and label the peo-ples.”

“This essay intends to shed light on their common grounds, question the validity of a mi-asma theory, an impactful product of Lina’s remarkable prejudiced view of Sorrow and fi-nally put to the test the best qualified resilience between Florens and Sorrow, in face of an engulfing messy politics where victims become victimizers and where nobody is permitted the privilege of normality.”

7. Avoid a succession of loose sentences. (p42 Style)

8. In summarizing the action of a drama, poem, story or novel, use the present tense (antecedent action should be expressed in the perfect; if in the past, by the past per-fect).

9. Do not use quotation marks when you use words ironically. Quotation marks should be used when you cite from a text.

10. Quoted text needs to be properly related to your text. Do not throw quotes in the midst of your paragraphs without connecting them with your sentences. Do not use

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them in parentheses as examples of your points. They need to be part of your discus-sion and analysis. For example:

Édouard Glissant best accounts for the different referent of creolization as a web of inter-cultural relations when he describes it as a “new and original dimension allowing each per-son to be there and elsewhere, rooted and open, lost in the mountains and free beneath the sea, in harmony and in errantry” (34); the radical and unanticipated occurrence of the new that results from the coexistence of rootedness and errantry signifies the “idea of Re-lation” that moves beyond the politics of a mere “encounter” and their effect of the originat-ing “shock” (Glissant 34).1 “Creolization carries along then into the adventure of multilin-gualism and into the terrible explosion of cultures” (Glissant 34); hence, rather than signify-ing the binary between dominant culture and the dependent minor cultures, intercultural poetics is the “autopoetics” (Wynter 2008) of the new communities forged beyond the dream narrative and imaginary of the sovereign nation state as a homogeneous commu-nity linearly developed through history.

11. Avoid beginning your sentences with And, So, But. In formal papers use: Moreover, Hence/Thus, However and so on. Avoid ending your main clauses with prepositions.

12. In formal papers, avoid colloquial language.13. Avoid “The truth is…”, “The fact is…”. Simply get to your point.14. Avoid generalizations that you do not support with a critical examination/analysis.For example: “Natives are free spirits.”

15. Be careful with terms that you use. For instance, Florens’s mother does not try to save her daughter from the dangers of sexual harassment but from sexual abuse, rape, and exploitation. To call this danger sexual harassment is an understatement and an anachronism.

16. When you use the pronoun “we” (“we, readers” for instance), be very critical. Ex-plain or question the collectivity of readers to which you are referring.

Generally in your essays:

Think of your title. Revise it after you finish your paper. Always revise your introduction and conclusion. Make sure they are your best paragraphs.

In your introduction: provide a context for your analysis. Present your topic and the ques-tions/arguments you want to raise and develop. Explain your politics of location where and when necessary (as a feminist, I always try to do so in my work).

In the main body of your text: do not forget to pursue a close reading of the text. Select the scenes you want to examine closely. Present/analyze the main points of the critics on whose work you are drawing.

Conclusion: Make sure you repeat your thesis and its main points in one paragraph to-wards the end of your paper. If you cannot do so, this means your paper needs more work.

Works Cited Page: List the works you have cited from or paraphrased in your essay.

Example of a Works Cited page (following the MLA style):

1 Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation. Trans. Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan UP, 1997.

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Works Cited

Agamben, Giorgio. What is an Apparatus? Trans. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009/.

Anim-Addo, Joan. Imoinda: Or She Who Will Lose Her Name. London: Mango Publish-

ing, 2008. Print.

---Touching the Body:History, Language and African-Caribbean Women’s Writ-

ing. London: Mango Publishing, 2008. Print.

---. “Tracing Knowledge, Culture and Power: Towards an Intercultural Approach to Literary Stud-

ies.”Anim-Addo, Covi and Karavanta 115-146.

Anim-Addo, Joan, Giovanna Covi and Mina Karavanta, eds. Interculturality and Gender.

London: Mango Publishing, 2009. Print.

Baucom, Ian. Specters of the Atlantic. Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2005.

Print.

Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, 1969. Print.

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical

Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. Print.

Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York & London: Routledge,

2006. Print.

Gandhi, Leela. Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-Siècle Radical-

ism and the Politics of Friendship. Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2006.

Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic. Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge,

Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1993.

Glissant, Édouard (1997). Poetics of Relation. Trans. Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: The University

of Michigan Press.

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Laclau, Ernesto and Chantal Mouffe. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Toward a Radi-

cal

Democratic Politics. London: New Left Books, 1985. Print.

Linebaugh, Peter and Marcus Rediker. The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Com-

moners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. Boston: Beacon

Press, 2000. Print.

Marzec, Robert P. An Ecological and Postcolonial Study of Literature. Hampshire &

New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Print.

Mbembe, Achille (2001). On the Postcolony. Berkeley: California University Press, 2001.

Mignolo, Walter D. Local Histories/Global Designs. Princeton: Princeton University Press,

2000. Print.

Morrison, Toni. A Mercy. New York & Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008. Print.

---. “Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation.” Toni Morrison: What Moves at the Mar-

gin. Ed. Caroly C. Denard. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2013. 56-65. Print.

---. “Toni Morrison Talking About her book A Mercy.” Web. 20 Jan. 2011.

‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-CGydX5VJY&feature=related›.

---.”Tony Morrison Discusses ‘A Mercy’.” Lynn Neary, NPR Correspondent. Web. 20 Jan. 2011.

‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IZvMhQ2LIU&feature=related›.

Shalini Puri, The Caribbean Postcolonial Palgrave MacMillan, 2004.

Radhakrishnan, R. History, the Human, and the World Between. Durham & London:

Duke University Press, 2008. Print.

---.Theory in an Uneven World. Malden & Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003. Print.

Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage Books, 1994.

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---. “Secular Criticism.” The World, the Text and the Critic. 1-31. Cambridge, Massachu-

setts: Harvard University Press, 1983. Print.

Spanos, William V. American Exceptionalism in the Age of Globalization: The

Specter of Vietnam. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008. Print.

---.America’s Shadow: An Anatomy of Empire. Minneapolis & London: University of

Minnesota Press, 2000. Print.

Spivak, Gaytatri Chakravorty. Death of a Discipline. New York: Columbia University Press,

2003. Print.

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