It is helpful to go through your previous marked essays and to apply the advice given by your tutor. The following advice is intended as an additional aid to help you check your work thoroughly.

 

Using Secondary Sources

You are reminded to take great care when using secondary sources. You should pay attention to:

• Choosing good sources. Start by consulting the bibliographical material available on the lecturers' pages. If you explore other online resources make sure that you consult reputable sources from clearly-identifiable online journals or other clearly reputable sources (such as the BBC, Le Monde, and so forth).
• Referencing. Are your references all accurate and correctly footnoted? Check the Study Skills pages if you are still unsure about how to reference. At this stage in the year, we expect your referencing to adhere clearly to the prescribed conventions, to be precise and to be complete.
• Avoiding plagiarism. Remember to acknowledge other peoples' ideas (as well as direct quotations) by footnoting their sources, and to ensure that you reference ALL quotations. Check that you have used quotation marks or block quotation appropriately, so that secondary sources NEVER become confused with your own writing.
• Bibliography. Have you remembered to include this?
• Quoting. Are your quotes accurate? Are all French words spelled correctly (including accents!)? Do your quotations make sense in the context of the sentence in which they occur? If you are in any doubt, take a look at the Study Skills pages and the Essay Writing Conventions pages, where there is a link through to 'introducing quotation'.

Using primary sources

• Read carefully.
• Quote accurately (the advice about quoting given above obtains when you use your primary source(s).)
• Avoid paraphrasing or describing the text. Remember that you are writing for an informed reader who knows the work and is interested in your interpretation of it. Each stage of your essay should present an argument or sub-argument, so that analysis predominates over description. Quotation should not be used to replace argument, but to illustrate it.

 

Submitting your work

• Submit electronically in the usual way and inform Cathy Hampton in good time if you have any kind of problem with submission.
• When you submit, make sure that you are logged in to the Warwick web pages (do not access the submission page and complete the form under a friend's login)

 

Marking and feedback

This assignment will normally be returned to you by Sunday 18th May.