Home / Composition 2 / The Term Paper

Level 8

MLA Format Criteria:

Font-type: Times New Roman
Font-Size: only 12 point
Indents: first line of each paragraph of the body indents 1/2" (not five space bar clicks)
Spacing: Double space every line in the paper (no more, no less)
Margins: 1" from all sides (page number header will be within that inch, and that is ok.) From the top, your masthead must be 1"
No Bold
No Underlines
No exclamation marks--EVER!!!!!!!!
A paragraph should be no less than 1/3 the size of a page and no larger than 1/2 the size of a page.

Word sets extra spacing after paragraphs; highlight all, right click, choose paragraphs, and set spacing after paragraphs to zero

Revisit the formatting assignment to determine where the tile is placed in the paper.
See this page to learn how to craft a title for your term paper

You only can have 20 of these pus words in your term paper.
Be mindful of contractions that hide pus words, such as it's or he's.
Do NOT use becomes or remains as a pus replacement; they do NOT mean the same as the pus words
All of them must be highlighted in yellow
Any Pus word not highlighted (or that exceeds 20 total) is subject to a rewrite.

Summarize the entire paper
Usually this paragraph is half a page
Begin with a thesis, which will be pretty general: This paper/my research/this research studies/analyzes the film Blahty-Blah through/with five theories
The rest of the introduction summarizes each small paper; one or two sentences per small paper.
Example: By using the concept of tropes, we can see how Blahity-Blah uses the tropes of Nameoftrope and Nameofanothertrope to give more meaning to scenes.
Lather, rinse, repeat for all of the small papers
Discuss these small papers in the same order they occur in the paper

IMDB Information on your film: Date of release, Director, Summary, etc.
How much the film made and awards:(The Numbers and Box Office Mojo and Rotten Tomatoes )

This tends to be a small paragraph as you will simply explain what you are doing in this paper
Start with a general overview of how we can use multiple theoretical lenses to examine any subject
Mention how there are hundreds of theories that could be used but that you are only using a few in this paper
Discuss those lenses without explaining or defining them in the order they occur in the paper.
Use people's names where possible; Ecocriticism was not made by one person;however, Performativity is from Butler

Lift these paragraphs directly from the five small papers.
Paragraphs should continually stack from one small paper to the next small paper
Do not cut, truncate, or diminish the small papers. All of what was stamped as good goes into this term paper.
Use the Full sentence: "blah blah" quote style, such as done in the small theory papers
Do not use dictionaries or encyclopaedias of any kind.
Do not use any of the linked sources on the Theory List page.

A conclusion in MLA does not "conclude" nor give results
A conclusion suggests other ways to continue on the research of the paper.
For this paper, you have four theories that you chose to not use in the paper that you can use in the conclusion
You do not need to analyze your film with these theories; simply mention how they could be used by someone else to continue the research of your film.

You can use Purdue's Online Writing Lab (Owl) or my color-coded abridged version on Inverseintuition.org:
- OWL
- InverseIntuition.org
If you use a citation maker, or any other source than the two listed above, and the citation does not match one of the two sources above, the citation is incorrect.
If I mark something wrong on your Works Cited, but you think it is correct, your only defense is to show me how you followed a page on OWL or on InverseIntuition.org