brackets. Example: “Milton’s Satan speaks of his study [pursuit] of revenge.”
Alterations of the original must be pointed out. This includes the indication of
modernized spelling in a footnote. Mark ellipses by three spaced periods in the middle
of a sentence [. . .] and four at the end.
5. All quotes should be clearly indicated as such. Observe the following conventions:
• If they are short, quotations appear in the body of the text with double quotation marks
and are usually preceded by a comma or a colon. You may incorporate verse
quotations of up to three lines into your text, separating the lines by a slash. Note
the space on each side ( / ).
• Prose quotations that are longer than three lines and verses should be set off from the
text: indent 10 spaces from the left margin (~ 1.5 cm) and reduce the line spacing to
single spacing. Be careful to retain the precise spatial arrangement (lines/spaces) of
the poem you quote. No quotation marks are required.
6. Provide parenthetical documentation both for all of your citations as well as for all of
your paraphrases. Statements made in the research paper must be verifiable: Document
all important and essential statements developed from other sources with parenthetical
references. The parenthetical references must clearly point to a specific work from your
works cited list. The reference should follow the information you have taken
immediately. Keep overall readability in mind, i.e. try to keep both the number and the
length of parenthetical references limited – but be accurate at all times!
The format of the parenthetical documentation is (Surname page number):
Medieval Europe was a place both of “raids, pillages, slavery and extortion” and of
“traveling merchants, monetary exchange, towns if not cities, and active markets in
grain” (Townsend 10).
Notice that the full stop comes after the reference if you are not quoting a full sentence.
The parenthetical reference corresponds to the following works cited entry:
Townsend, Robert M. The Medieval Village Economy. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1993.
If you are using more than one work by the same author, include the first word of the
respective title in your reference, i.e. (Hutcheon Politics 12) and (Hutcheon Poetics 35)
correspond to the following works cited entries:
Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. London and
New York: Routledge, 1988.
. The Politics of Postmodernism. London and New York: Routledge, 1989.
Footnotes
In certain cases you may use footnotes for explanations or annotations of related
interest to a point in your discussion, which is important enough not to be omitted from
your text entirely but which would distort the overall coherence of your own line of
argument. However: Never use footnotes for information that can be given in the main
text!
IMPORTANT: If you will be quoting primarily from one literary text, then you should
announce this and give the edition you will be using in a footnote the first time you
cite. This way, you can reduce the parenthetical documentation to page numbers and
increase readability:
Another formal aspect
• Italicise or underline foreign words in an English/German text. (e.g.: “The term
écriture féminine was developed in the context of French feminist theory”, “Das
englische Wort image wird im Deutschen oft benutzt”; Exception: clearly anglicized
words, such as cliché).
General Remark