The volatility of the internet means that links disappear constantly. Please inform me of any dead ones, as I don't maintain this page with any regularity.

Literary Studies

• Voice of the Shuttle: Literature in English (Alan Liu, UCSB)
• The Literary Encyclopedia: an online reference work-in-progress for literary scholars with entries on people, works, terms and topics
• Glossary of Poetic Terms | LitGloss (part of Bedford St. Martin's Re:Writing for Literature)
• Al Filreis, "Modern and Contemporary American Poetry" (U of Pennsylvania): an online course in understanding modernist and postmodern poetry.

• Voice of the Shuttle: Cultural Studies | Gender and Sexuality Studies | Literary Theory | Media Studies | Minority Studies
• The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory & Criticism (HSU users only)
• "Critical Reading: A Guide" (John Lye, Brock U)
• "The Problem of Meaning in Literature" (John Lye, Brock U)
• English 420 Critical Theory Resources (Michael Eldridge, HSU)

Critical Writing

• Getting an "A" on an English Paper (Jack Lynch, Rutgers University - Newark).  Neither I nor your other professors will necessarily agree with everything you'll find here; nevertheless, Lynch passes along some sound general principles. See also the somewhat stodgier Papers: Expectations, Guidelines, Advice, and Grading by Jeannine de Lombard and Dan White of the University of Toronto, and Lynch's own carefully hidden section on Grades.
• Verlyn Klinkenborg, "Where Do Sentences Come From?" (New York Times "Opinionator" blog). "[M]aking sentences in your head will elicit thoughts you didn’t know you could have. Thinking patiently will yield far better sentences than you thought you could make."
  "Why American Students Can't Write" (The Atlantic online). A topic--a premise, even--that's hotly debated by your professors. You can become privy to the debate here.

Style and Mechanics

• Purdue University's Online Writing Lab (OWL) has a guide to MLA (Modern Language Association) Style (among many other writer's resources). Although it's detailed and reliable, it's not a substitute for your own copy of the MLA Handbook.
• The Q & A page of the website for the Chicago Manual of Style is hugely entertaining, in a witty, nerdy, English-major sort of way. (Take care, though: while Chicago style is standard in publishing and some academic disciplines, we follow MLA style in English.)
• Grammar and Style Notes (Jack Lynch, Rutgers University - Newark)
• Strunk's Elements of Style (1918 edition, Bartleby.com)
• Many of the free writing resources that used to reside on Bedford/St. Martin's Re:Writing and Re:Writing Basics websites (and other, related sites from the same publisher) have disappeared altogether or been moved behind paywalls. However, Re:Writing still has some useful resources on Research & Documentation, Revision, and Peer Review. You may also wish to check out "LitGloss: Literary Terms and Definitions," "The Bedford Research Room" (a collection of guides and tutorials about doing college research), and "Avoiding Plagiarism: A Tutorial."
• Michael Harvey's The Nuts and Bolts of College Writing began life as an online handbook and morphed into an inexpensive print version that you can find at Amazon and elsewhere. An abridged version is online (until someone issues a "cease and desist" order for copyright violation).
• Louis Menand, "The End Matter: The Nightmare of Citation" (The New Yorker 6 October 2003). Ostensibly a review of the Chicago Manual of Style, this is an entertaining essay on the maddeningly arbitrary nature of proper citation.
• Louis Menand, "Bad Comma: Lynne Truss's Strange Grammar" (The New Yorker 28 June 2004). What begins as a somewhat querulous review of the best-seller Eats, Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation settles down into an essay about the intangibility of writerly "voice."

General Reference

• Voice of the Shuttle General Reference Page (Alan Liu, UCSB) includes links to online dictionaries & thesauri, grammar & style guides, scholarly reference guides, and guides to critical thinking.
• Bartleby.com gives you access to a whole slew of indispensable reference books, including the American Heritage Dictionary (and Book of English Usage), Roget's Thesaurus, Bartlett's Quotations, the King James Bible, a complete Shakespeare, and the CIA World Factbook.
• Oxford English Dictionary on-line (HSU users only).
• Plumb Design Visual Thesaurus.  An extremely cool site that lets you visualize the shades of meaning among closely related words.
• HSU Library:  from here you can (among other things) search the HSU catalog, the catalogs of other libraries around the world, and dozens of databases indexing articles in journals, magazines and newspapers.  The most useful databases for literary studies are WorldCat (for books in other libraries); Academic Search, ArticleFirst, JSTOR, MLA Bibliography, OmniFile, Oxford Journals, Project Muse and Xtreme Search multi-database search (for articles in journals); and Dow Jones Interactive and LexisNexis (for articles in popular periodicals).
• HSU Library's English Research Guide

Some Interesting Articles

• Adam Gopnik, "The Double Man" (The New Yorker 23 September 2003). What's poetry for? What's it supposed to do? Gopnik ponders that question in the course of considering the work of W. H. Auden.
• Adam Gopnik, "Will Power" (The New Yorker 13 September 2004). Biographical criticism--reading an author's work as the expression of his "individual genius," or as the product of his life and times--is generally regarded as old-fashioned and unsophisticated. But in a review of Stephen Greenblatt's new biography of Shakespeare, Gopnik (himself a smart and sensitive critic) outlines a subtler and more useful form of bio-crit informed by New Historicist principles.
• "The Books Everyone Must Read Before Leaving College" (The Daily Beast Book Bag). Can there really be any consensus on this topic? Is it even useful to have a discussion about it? Some "leading academics and authors" weigh in.

Careers in English

• "What Can I Do With a Major in English?" (HSU Career Center; scroll to "English")
• "Liberal Arts Jobs" (Occupational Outlook Quarterly [U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics] 2007-08)
• "Jobs for English Majors: They Do Exist" (The Salary Reporter 22 September 2009)
• Careers for English Majors (University of Washington Department of English)
• "Word: Careers in English" (Michael Eldridge)