When you plagiarise someone’s work you present his/her ideas and research as your own without acknowledging your source. For instance, when you copy & paste a sentence from an online article or when you summarize some ideas presented in a monograph from the library without quoting your sources you’re committing plagiarism. When you steal someone else’s work, you’re committing a disciplinary offence and you’re violating the principle of academic honesty. These actions can lead to your expulsion from the seminar and – in very serious cases – to your exmatriculation. Avoiding plagiarism requires compliance with good academic practice in source use and citation – and this applies to all aspects of your studies, including to the researching and writing of academic presentations and to the researching and writing of term papers.

Declaration of Authorship

Please print and sign a Declaration of Authorship.

An important part of a successful presentation or a convincing term paper is your informed use of academic secondary sources to provide background information on critical debates or historical contexts, to present the opinions of established critics in the field or to introduce theoretical concepts. Secondary sources are scholarly monographs, essay collections, journal articles and reliable, academic internet databases; i.e. you must never quote from Wikipedia or a random blog on modernist poetry. If you’re unsure if a specific source satisfies academic standards just get in touch with your lecturer and ask.

Over the course of your studies you will learn to become an independent literary scholar and to engage critically with secondary sources. This means that you will learn not just to draw on secondary sources to provide historical context or to explain a theoretical point: instead, will learn actively to engage with other critics’ arguments. This entails explaining how your argument differs from/expands on/refines/etc. other critics’ arguments.

For more information on researching, writing, and formatting your term paper and on citing secondary sources please refer to the Stylesheet!

Use the MLA online bibliography. It is a huge database compiling not all but the majority of books and journal articles published in the humanities. You can access the database through the central library’s website (there is a link to “Datenbanken” on the homepage). Once you have opened the MLA’s search interface, you can enter one or several keywords pertaining to what you are looking for. These keywords could be authors, primary or secondary works, concepts etc. You will then see a list of titles connected to your search words. Keep in mind that even though your keywords might pop up in one of these texts, you still have to decide whether they might be helpful for your research. The MLA database is useful both for getting a quick overview of what has already been written on your respective topic and for deciding which titles to read in more detail. Often, when you click on one of the titles, you have access to an abstract summarizing the text, or sometimes even the full text.

The MLA online bibliography is linked to the University’s central library, Universitätsbibliothek Passau, and allows you to check right away if the source is available in Passau. If a source you need should not be available at the central library, you can order it via interlibrary loan. For books, this service is free. Requesting a copy of an article via interlibrary loan may incur a fee, usually € 1,50. Interlibrary loans give you access to millions of books and journals that belong to the holdings of universities all over Germany.

In addition to the MLA online bibliography, you may use the online bibliographies provided by JSTOR or Google Scholar. JSTOR works similarly to the MLA online bibliography. It can also be accessed via the central library and in many cases offers the option to directly download journal articles. Google Scholar is a search engine freely available on the internet, usually without access to full texts. Google Scholar mostly identifies scholarly texts but you should be aware that some sources may not be as academically rigorous as those identified through the MLA bibliography or JSTOR. While you should therefore be extra careful in selecting your sources from Google Scholar, this search engine often finds resources the other bibliographies have missed.

You need to document your sources in two different ways:

1. in-text citations (in the body of your paper)
2. citation in the List of Works Cited at the end of your paper

Please use the parenthetical system of documentation as explained in the MLA Handbook (for a short overview see the stylesheet (there’s a link in the upper right corner of this page).

- Identify ideas or issues that were raised in class but that class discussion didn’t explore in detail

- Focus on formal features that interest you: recurring motifs; genre conventions and their subversion; character development / character constellation

- Focus on thematic concerns of the text that seem particularly interesting to you (e.g. the representation of the relationship between monarch and subjects; sibling relationhips; mental pathologies; the portrayal of urban or rural space, … – whichever thematic facet of the text strikes you as worthy of further exploration can be turned into the kernel of your term paper)

- Does your text contain aspects that could be usefully illuminated by the application of terms and concepts from critical theory (e.g., hybridity / mimicry / gender performance, performativity / heteroglossia / the uncanny / habitus / ideology…)?

- Compare two texts which engage with the same problem or share concerns

Introduction

The introduction is the first section of your term paper. It presents the reader with a clear idea of the general topic of your paper; it also lays out the specific thesis / main argument that you will develop. The thesis has to be clearly stated, ideally in one sentence:

In this paper I will argue THESIS STATEMENT. I will demonstrate YOUR THESIS by discussing issues 1, 2 and 3.

Optional: Section on Historical Context / Theoretical Concepts

If the topic of your essay is informed by historical circumstances / theoretical concepts, it will be useful to include a section at the beginning that provides a brief introduction to the historical or theoretical context of your argument. Remember that the main focus of your paper needs to consist of your reading of the text, not of a summary of secondary literature and/or historical context. Don’t include information that has no bearing on your argument as developed in subsequent sections.

Main Part

(Feel free to rename this section according to the focus of your term paper)

A division into sections can help to clarify the structure of your argument. You may give your sections subheadings but avoid any subheadings beyond this, otherwise you risk losing the coherence of your overall argument. Each individual section is made up of paragraphs, each of which should present one idea.

Conclusion

The conclusion is the last section of your paper. It summarises your initial thesis and indicates how the evidence presented in your main part has contributed to your analysis. While you should not introduce completely new material in your conclusion, you should briefly reflect on the larger implications of your argument and its significance. For instance, you could briefly discuss how your analysis connects to larger issues of the text or a larger critical debate.

Several aspects of your writing, from clarity to choice of words, will affect the quality of your paper and the extent to which your reader is able to follow your line of thought. Use an academic register that helps you to state your arguments in a scholarly, non-judgemental manner. While your opinions are valuable in the analytic process, the writing itself should be evidence-based and not opinionated or personal. It is generally advised that you re-read your papers before submitting them. If you stumble across certain phrases or find it difficult to follow the argumentation, your reader will probably have the same difficulties. By stating your points clearly and providing smooth transitions between paragraphs, you help your reader to follow your overall line of argumentation. In the end, this will make your argumentation more convincing.