We seek to stimulate independent thinking in our students as you react to literature and to the events of your lives. Academic dishonesty fundamentally threatens to destroy the climate of respect for students as thinkers whose writing reflects their own ideas. Failure to acknowledge using someone else's words or ideas is plagiarism, and it is a serious academic offense.

In addition to this general statement, we offer the following detailed guidelines. If in doubt about a question of academic integrity, students should ask their teachers.

• 1. Students must place quotation marks around and clearly cite the sources of direct quotations. If a paper is about one book and students are not expected to consult other sources, teachers may direct students simply to cite the page number in parentheses after the quotation.
• 2. Clear guidelines for footnoting when quoting from secondary sources is contained in the Borzoi Handbook and the Smith College Handbook for Writing. Copies of these books are available in the English office.
• 3. Any time that a student is aware that an idea or a way to phrase an idea comes from someone other than the student (a parent, a tutor, a book, a friend, the World Wide Web, and so on), then that source must be acknowledged in writing by the student.
• 4. Receiving help from another student in the form of editing and proofreading of essays is not a violation of academic honesty within the English Department. Indeed, the Department encourages such peer collaboration, so long as the teacher is aware of such practice.
• 5. Specific guidelines about research essays will be given by individual teachers, but the above expectations are uniform in the English Department.

Quotations from Dante's Inferno

When quoting from the poem, simply cite the canto and line number(s) of what you are quoting. If the quotation is one or two lines, use / to indicate separation of lines. If the quotation is more than a couple of lines, block the quotation without the use of quotation marks by indenting the quoted lines.

In telling the pilgrim the story of his family's starvation, Ugolino deflects all guilt from himself onto Count Ruggieri: "There is no need to tell you that, because/of his malicious tricks I first was taken..." (XXXIII 16-17).

In telling the pilgrim the story of his family's starvation, Ugolino deflects all guilt from himself onto Count Ruggieri:

There is no need to tell you that, because
of his malicious tricks I first was taken 
and then was killed--since I had trusted him... 
you now shall hear and know if he has wronged me. (XXXIII 1617).

Footnotes

There are two purposes for footnotes:

• 1. Citing your sources.
• 2. Providing further discussion of an idea or information that is not important enough to be in the actual text of your paper.

In your papers, you would generally only use a footnote for the first purpose: citing your sources. Most of you will cite a book, an article in a periodical, or an article in a book-length collection.

• 1 First name before last name, Title of Book (Place of publication: publisher, year) page number.
• 2 John Freccero, Dante: The Poetics of Conversion (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1986) 36.

You do not need to footnote Dante 's Inferno. Simply cite an quotations from this poem by giving the canto and line numbers parenthetically, as illustrated above.

• 3 First name before last name, "Title of Article," Name of Periodical Volume (Date): Page Number.
• 4 Robert Hollander, "Dante on Horseback," Italica LXI (1984): 287.

• 5 First name before last name, "Title of Article," Title of Book, ed. Name of Editor (Place of Publication: Publisher, Year) Page number.
• 6 Bruno Nardi, "Dante and Medieval Culture," Dante: A Collection of Critical Essays ed. John Freccero (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1965) 40.

Use the shortest possible note that will identify your source.

• 7 Nardi 42.

In some scholarly fields, scholars have agreed to dispense with traditional footnoting and have adopted a parenthetical form of footnoting. In this system, the author cites a source parenthetically, giving enough information so that the reader can find the source listed in the bibliography.

In his essay about "Dante and Medieval Culture," Nardi argues that Dante blamed the Catholic church for the bloody chaos of his age: "...the Church, by allowing itself to become involved in the affairs of this world, had betrayed its evangelic mission and was setting an example of bad conduct for Christians" (Nardi 41).

A bibliography is a list of all of the works cited and consulted by an author of a research essay. The purpose of a bibliography is to enable a reader to find information about these sources that can enable the reader to find and consult the source.

Entries in your bibliography should follow the same format as given above for footnotes, except that you list the author s last name first so that the bibliography is alphabetized.

All students must include a bibliography listing the works cited and/or consulted in the course of the research project.