Styling and formatting essays can be a major PITA. Why can’t our arguments stand on their own merits? That’s how I used to think for more than half of my university career.
And for most of my time at university I was throwing away easy marks. People fear learning proper essay styling and formatting because it seems boring and unnecessarily complicated. But you only need to learn the principles once and you’ll always know them.
Learning proper essay formatting is as important as using proper spelling, grammar, and terminology. You wouldn’t expect to get top marks if you make silly spelling mistakes, so you shouldn’t expect top marks if you can’t get your essay formatting and stylistic conventions down.
Another funny thing happens when you learn proper essay styling and formatting… Your arguments improve! Correct formatting and styling results in a closer attention to detail and, in forcing your mode of expression to be crisper and more controlled, leads to greater clarity of thought.
So how exactly do you correctly style and format your university essays?
How to Style and Format Your University Essays
None of these “rules” or guidelines are my own. I learnt them from my English Literature tutors at the University of Oxford and from reading style and formatting manuals.
These guidelines are also not comprehensive but they will give you the most bang for your buck.
And, lastly, these guidelines will serve you well at Oxford, Cambridge, and many other UK universities, but there are bound to be differences in how universities across the globe prefer their essays to be styled and formatted. Make sure you check your own university’s guidelines to see where they differ from the ones outlined here.
How to Format Titles
Titles of books, novels, plays, journals, and long poems should be written in italics.
Examples:
- Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
- Speed-the-Plow by David Mamet
- The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot
- The Paris Review
The exception to this first rule is if you are writing by hand. By hand, simply underline in lieu of using italics.
Titles of short stories, individual poems, or journal articles should be in single quotation marks.
Examples:
- ‘The Black Cat’ by Edgar Allen Poe
- ‘The Catch’ by Simon Armitage
- ‘A Mob Killing and Flawed Justice’ by Alissa J. Rubin
How to Format Quotations
Short quotations are vastly superior to long quotations most of the time.
Long quotations are unwieldy beasts that rarely have a reason for being in your essay other than to puff up the word count.
Long quotations are also easy to mess up. You might write them incorrectly.
It is much better to use a short quote of a word, phrase, or small sentence that you cite correctly than a long one that you cite incorrectly.
Short quotes are easier to analyse too. The longer the quote, the higher chance of dumping extraneous material that you don’t get around to analysing.
Signal your quotations with the standard double quotation marks: like “this”.
When quoting verse within the body of a paragraph (i.e. without indentations and separated from the main body of the paragraph), use an oblique stroke like this: /
Also try to cite line numbers when quoting poetry if possible.
You should cite line numbers like this:
- l. = line
- ll. = lines
We would quote two lines from Wilfred Owen’s ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’ like this: “Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes / Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes” (ll.11-12).
When quoting from plays, supply the Act, scene, and line numbers in a consistent way. For example: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, IV, ii, 52-53.
If you’re quoting long passages, you’ll want to indent these away from the main body of your essay. Don’t put quotation marks around indented quotations (unless it’s part of dialogue from the text your quoting), utilise single-spacing (in contrast to your main body, which is typically double-spaced), and use elision in square brackets wherever you omit pieces of the text like this: […]
How to Format Bibliographies
Provide bibliographies for every essay you write. It is a necessity at the university level and to do without one is to throw away a lot of marks (and credibility).
There are many different ways to format a bibliography. Your university will have its preferred citation style (APA, MLA, Chicago, Oxford, Harvard, etc). However you choose to format your bibliography, ensure that you remain consistent.
This is how we formatted our bibliographies at Oxford:
Author names are cited alphabetically by surname. Next you have the title of the work you’re citing. Then you have the publishing house. You end with the date of publication.
If the citation takes up more than one line, you should use a hanging indentation from the second line to more clearly separate the different citations.
Many Oxford literary students made use of two separate bibliographies in their essays. One bibliography was for primary sources (novels, plays, poems), the other was for secondary sources (criticism, etc).
How to Format Footnotes
Footnotes are a little bit different from bibliographies.
You don’t want to give tons of information in the footnote because the reader can get that in the bibliography.
Introduce what you need to along with the relevant page numbers. To save space repeating yourself, you might wish to indicate in the footnote (at the end of the citation) that ‘all subsequent references are to this edition, incorporated in the text’.
If you cite that same source multiple times in a row but with different page numbers, you can either put the page number in brackets in the text beside the quotation rather than use another footnote, which looks tidier in my opinion, or you can simply write ‘Ibid‘ followed by the page number.
This is how footnotes typically looked in an Oxford student’s essay:
You can see in the footnotes here, the information is written a little differently from the bibliography.
You give the full name (not surname first), followed by the work, then publishing house, date of publication, followed by page number. Many other students would put the publishing house in brackets next to the date separated by a comma.
Always Proofread Your Work
You will always find silly mistakes in your essays.
If you’re writing a tutorial essay or coursework, you have the time, ability, and software to go back over your work and ensure it’s free from careless mistakes.
I highly recommend you invest in a proofreading software like Grammarly.
Software like Grammarly will elevate your writing ability and your final grades.
PEE On Your Work: Essay Structure Tip
The best essay writing technique I learnt at Oxford is incredibly basic.
Structure your academic essays like this:
- Point
- Example
- Explanation
There are other ways of phrasing this. Some essay structure models make it more complicated. But it always comes down to this.
- Point: What’s your point? First sentence of your paragraph = tell me your theory/idea.
- Example: Give me an example in your next few sentences to back it up. Quote secondary sources (critics, theorists, etc).
- Explanation: Elaborate further. Unpick the critical sources you just cited. Do they support your point/hypothesis? Do they add nuance/complication to your argument?
My mentor in Oxford told me that essays are basically a bunch of paragraphs with each one introducing an idea you want to test. You then throw a bunch of experts in the ring, pit them against each other, let them fight it out, and see what comes out in support of your idea.
And that’s how you format and style your university essays!
We could get into the weeds and list all the little details that you may or may not need. But, honestly, if we’re doing an 80/20 analysis of the university essay style and formatting techniques that will help you the most, those are the aspects you’ll want to nail. Do that stuff and anything else will be forgiven!