Student Handbook - The School of Language, Linguistics and Film

Some people who have substantial difficulties with spelling are dyslexic. If you suspect that
your writing problems may come into this category, you should contact the Disability and
Dyslexia Service (dds@qmul.ac.uk) to arrange a diagnosis.
Documenting your essay
We do not expect your essay to consist purely of your own ideas and opinions. It will
naturally include some material that you have acquired from lectures or seminars. But there
are other sources on which you can draw: books, articles in journals, and websites. In
general, you should be guided by your teacher’s recommendations for reading. He or she
may have deliberately left a book off a reading list because it is too rudimentary or too
difficult, or because its conclusions are not accepted among scholars. You should be very
careful about using material from websites, because this has often not gone through the
quality controls required in academic books or journals. But never keep silent about a
source because you do not know whether the teacher will approve of it or not. If consulting
an unreliable source leads you into error, you will lose marks for the error anyway, and to
mention the source at least gives you some excuse.
The rule is that, whatever sources you use, you must acknowledge them. Not to do so
is dishonest since it is seeking credit for someone else’s work (see Plagiarism under §
5.1 ASSESSMENT). To acknowledge a source means: (i) to list it in a bibliography; (ii) to
give references in the text of your essay itself. Both are essential. The form these
acknowledgements take is largely a matter of convention. Other departments may require
you to do things slightly differently. But when submitting essays to the School of Languages,
Linguistics and Film, please make sure you keep to the following guidelines.
The School of Languages, Linguistics and Film prefers the so-called ‘Author-date’ (or
‘Harvard’) system. This means that, rather than having to add a footnote or endnote every
time you need to document the source of an idea, you simply add a bracket in the text giving
the surname of the author, the date of the publication referred to, a colon, and the relevant
page numbers. Thus, if you found a particular point on page 330 of an article by Charles A.
Ferguson, published in 1950, you should, after making that point in your essay, add a brief
reference in the form (Ferguson 1950: 330). To enable your reader to make sense of these
references, you will then need to include at the end of your essay a bibliography giving the
full details of all the material you read for that essay. These should be listed alphabetically
by author and chronologically by date (i.e. they should begin with exactly the information
included in the brackets in your text). They should contain enough information to enable the
reader to check the reference for him or herself, including the exact title and the exact place
of publication. Ferguson’s article is entitled ‘Diglossia’ and appeared in the 15th issue of a
journal called Word. In a bibliography therefore it would appear as: Ferguson, Charles A
(1950), ‘Diglossia’, Word, 15: 325-40.
Notes: Besides the bibliography, you may also want to add information to your essay other
than in the text. This is best done through notes, with a number superscripted in the text
referring to the note which then appears either at the bottom of the page (‘footnotes’) or after
the end of the essay itself (‘endnotes’). However, notes should always be kept to a
minimum, and in many essays are quite unnecessary.
Writing a bibliography
Remember: All essays must have a bibliography attached at the end; failure to provide
one will have a serious effect on your mark. This list should include all the reading you
have done in the preparation of your essay, even if you haven’t used it directly. If you are
writing about a particular text or texts, do not forget to include details of the edition(s) you
have used. Do not include in this list anything you have not read.
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