Literature

• Voice of the Shuttle English Literature Page (Alan Liu, UCSB)
• Gale Literary Databases: search the online editions of Contemporary Authors, Contemporary Literary Criticism, and the Dictionary of Literary Biography (HSU users only--but beware: budget cuts mean that these online references may soon disappear)
• Glossary of Poetic Terms

• "Critical Reading: A Guide" (John Lye, Brock U)
• "The Problem of Meaning in Literature" (John Lye, Brock U)
• The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory & Criticism Online (HSU users only).  You may find the following entries of particular interest:
• "New Criticism"
• "Practical Criticism"
• Voice of the Shuttle: Cultural Studies | Gender Studies | Literary Theory | Media Studies | Minority Studies

Critical Writing & the Writing Process

• Getting an "A" on an English Paper (Jack Lynch, Rutgers University - Newark).  Neither I nor your other professors will necessarily agree with everything here; nevertheless, Lynch offers 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. And while you're at it, peruse "LitCrit Papers: What Faculty Know But Don't Always Articulate": Professor Marianne Ahokas is spot-on about every item on that list (as she is about so much else). I suggest you commit each bullet point to memory.
• The Bedford Researcher (Mike Palmquist, Bedford/St. Martin's Press) includes advice on the research process, model research papers on various topics, and links to writers' resources and Online Writing Centers at universities around the country.
• Michael Harvey's The Nuts and Bolts of College Writing, originally developed as an online resource, is a good basic handbook which you could easily purchase online or order from your local independent bookstore. (Is the copy you'll find at the end of the preceding link legitimate and/or authorized? Reader: I do not know.)
• The Writing Process (Overview):
  • Purdue University's justly famous OWL (Online Writing Lab)
  • Hunter College Reading/Writing Center
• Elements of the Writing Process:
• Invention/Pre-Writing:
  • Invention Techniques (Hunter College RWC)
  • Questions for Writing about Literature (Hunter College RWC)
• The Thesis:
  • Erik Simpson, "Five Ways of Looking at a Thesis"
  • Jack Lynch, "The Thesis"
• The Paragraph (Purdue University OWL)
• Revising, Editing & Proofreading:
  • Revision Guidelines and Revision Checklist (Hunter College RWC)
  • Editing and Proofreading Strategies (Colorado State University Writing Studio) (PDF version)

Style and Mechanics (including Citation & Documentation)

• Research and Documentation Online (Diana Hacker, Bedford/St. Martin's Press) covers finding and documenting sources in the Humanities and other disciplines.
• If you already own a copy of the MLA Handbook (and why wouldn't you?), you probably have an access code that gets you into the online version of the English major's bible of all matters style-and-formatting. Purdue University's Online Writing Lab has its own online MLA guide.
• Grammar and Style Notes (Jack Lynch, Rutgers University - Newark)
• Louis Menand, "The End Matter: The Nightmare of Citation" (The New Yorker 6 October 2003). Ostensibly a review of the latest edition of the Chicago Manual of Style, this is an entertaining essay on the maddeningly arbitrary nature of proper citation.
• Strunk's Elements of Style (1918 edition, Bartleby.com)
• Louis Menand, "Bad Comma: Lynne Truss's Strange Grammar" (The New Yorker 28 June 2004). What begins as a somewhat querulous review of the former 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).
• Thinkmap's Visual Thesaurus.  An extremely cool site that lets you visualize the shades of meaning among closely related words. (Unfortunately, you only get to try it out a handful of times before they ask you to pay.)
• 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) and JSTOR, MLA Bibliography, OmniFile, and Project Muse (for articles in journals). You may also wish to try Oxford Journals, Sage Journals Online, Taylor & Francis Online, ArticleFirst and/or Academic Search Premier.
• 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 unfashionable 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.