Documentation: Preparing the List of Work Cited

Hello friends 

I am Bhavna Sosa from Department of English MKBU. This blog about 'Documentation: Preparing the List of Work Cited'. This task was given by Megha ma'am. 

What is Citation?

A citation is a reference to the source of information used in your research. Any time you directly quote, paraphrase or summarize the essential elements of someone else's idea in your work, an in-text citation should follow. An in-text citation is a brief notation within the text of your paper or presentation which refers the reader to a fuller notation, or end-of-paper citation, that provides all necessary details about that source of information.

Direct quotations should be surrounded by quotations marks and are generally used when the idea you want to capture is best expressed by the source. 

Paraphrasing and summarizing involve rewording an essential idea from someone else's work, usually to either condense the point or to make it better fit your writing style.

You do not have to cite your own ideas, unless they have been published. And you do not have to cite common knowledge, or information that most people in your audience would know without having to look it up.

In-Text Citations

In-text citations alert the reader to an idea from an outside source.

What is book review?

A review is a critical evaluation of a text, event, object, or phenomenon. Reviews can consider books, articles, entire genres or fields of literature, architecture, art, fashion, restaurants, policies, exhibitions, performances, and many other forms. This handout will focus on book reviews. For a similar assignment, see our handout on literature reviews.

Above all, a review makes an argument. The most important element of a review is that it is a commentary, not merely a summary. It allows you to enter into dialogue and discussion with the work’s creator and with other audiences. You can offer agreement or disagreement and identify where you find the work exemplary or deficient in its knowledge, judgments, or organization. You should clearly state your opinion of the work in question, and that statement will probably resemble other types of academic writing, with a thesis statement, supporting body paragraphs, and a conclusion.

The Only Story by Juliana Barnes 

"Would you rather love the more, and suffer the more; or love the less, and suffer the less? That is, I think, finally, the only real question."

The Only Story stakes bold claims and provokes surprising questions that demonstrate Barnes is anything but resting on his laurels.

He states the novel’s thesis, via narrator Paul, on the opening page this way:

Most of us have only one story to tell. I don’t mean that only one thing happens to us in our lives: there are countless events, which we turn into countless stories. But there’s only one that matters, only one finally worth telling. This is mine.

As Paul’s story unfolds, it becomes clear that it’s about love in general and first love in particular, which, the book argues, is the only story we really have to tell about ourselves.

Consider teeth, for example. Paul says of Susan’s,

I must tell you about her teeth. Well, two of them, anyway. The middle front ones at the top. She called them her “rabbit teeth” because they were perhaps a millimeter longer than the strict national average; but that, to me, made them the more special. I used to tap them lightly with my middle finger, checking that they were there, and secure, just as she was. It was a little ritual, as if I was taking an inventory of her.

It’s difficult not to smile at this slightly ridiculous but entirely believable romantic gesture. Her teeth show up throughout the first part of the novel, until they are, in heartbreaking fashion, lost. If Barnes has something to say here, it’s that little things like affection for teeth are the signum et res - the sign and the reality - of true love.

There’s an illuminating contrast, however, between Paul and Susan’s story and that of Shostakovich in The Noise of Time. Is the latter’s love for his spouse not all the more poignant, interesting, and sustainable precisely because she is not his only love? Isn’t it his passion for music that made Shostakovich an appealing lover in the first place? In her brilliant 2017 Paris Review piece “What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men?” Claire Dederer asks if all artists are not monsters in some sense given that selfishness is always involved in the finishing of a work. Provocative as such a question is, couldn’t the opposite case also be made? Namely, that the lover with no project of her or his own is the real monster, because lack of interest in the cultivation of self results in a subjectivity so dull that any captivating romantic love with such a person is out of the question. Given the choice between Shostakovich and Paul, who would not choose the former?

Paul’s love story may not be all that interesting, but Barnes’s analysis of it certainly is. As in his other works, the author applies a scalpel to human consciousness to expose his protagonist’s intentions, beliefs, and neuroses with astute observation. Part one of the novel is in first person, part two in second, part three in third, and these different voices correspond to different stages in Paul and Susan’s relationship: the birth of love, the death of love, and the aftermath of love. Each part has its moments of enchanting, psychologically descriptive prose, such as this musing of Paul’s from the first section:

She laughs at life, this is part of her essence. She laughs at what I laugh at. She also laughs at hitting me on the head with a tennis ball; at the idea of having sherry with my parents; she laughs at her husband, just as she does when crashing the gears of the Austin shooting break.

Work Cited : 

 https://www.marian.edu/docs/default-source/marian's-adult-programs-documents/what-is-citation.pdf?sfvrsn=76a375fd_2. 

“Book Reviews.” The Writing Center • University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 23 Sept. 2021, https://writingcenter.unc.edu/tips-and-tools/book-reviews/. 

Barnes, Julian. The Only Story. Jonathan Cape, 2018.

Millay, Thomas J. Annotations of Pain: First Love in “The Only Story,” 17 Apr. 2018.