"Inverted commas" and Italics
You use inverted commas to indicate the title of:
1. a poem (e.g. "An Irish Airman Foresees his death")
2. a short story, (e.g. "The New Dress")
3. or an article in a magazine or journal (e.g. "The Perfect Pattern: Paradise Regained").
The reasoning behind this is that these are all extracts from full publications (i.e. a collection of poems, a collection of short stories or a journal). By contrast, you use italics when you're referring to an actual full publication. These include:
1. a novel (e.g. The Great Gatsby)
2. a play (e.g. A Midsummer Night's Dream)
3. a collection of poems, plays or stories (e.g. Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats or The Complete Works of William Shakespeare)
4. or a journal (e.g. English in Africa).
Incorporating quotations
I cannot stress enough how important it is to "incorporate" your quotations into your sentence structure. What do I mean by this? Consider the following example:
In "The Cinnamon Peeler" the speaker establishes an imagined context for himself and his beloved ("If I were a cinnamon peeler").
I've made an assertion about the poem and I've backed it up with evidence, so what's the problem? Well, the problem is that I've shown no CAUSAL LINK between my assertion and my evidence and, consequently, I'm not making an ARGUMENT. This is easy to fix, however. I can simply say:
In "The Cinnamon Peeler" the speaker establishes an imagined context for himself and his beloved when he says "If I were a cinnamon peeler"(1).
Do you see how the second example incorporates my quotation into my sentence structure? You always need to do this in your paragraph and essay writing.
Here endeth today's lesson.
