Research/Documentation/Style & Format

• 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.
• Research and Documentation Online (Diana Hacker, Bedford/St. Martin's Press) covers finding and documenting sources in the Humanities and other disciplines.
• 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.)
• If you already own a copy of the MLA Handbook (and why wouldn't you?), you should have an access code that gets you into the online version. Purdue University's justly famous "OWL" (Online Writing Lab) has its own online MLA guide.
• The 6th edition of the MLA's Literary Research Guide (which, despite its title, focuses heavily but not exclusively on literary studies) is online only.
• Alexis E. Ramsey, ed., Working in the Archives: Practical Research Methods for Rhetoric and Composition (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2010) (e-book; HSU users only)

Literary Studies

• 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

• Voice of the Shuttle: Cultural Studies | Gender Studies | Literary Theory | Media Studies | Minority Studies
• The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory & Criticism (HSU users only)
• Key Concepts in Postcolonial Studies (The Imperial Archive)
• Dino Felluga's Introductory Guide to Critical Theory at Purdue University
• "Critical Reading: A Guide" (John Lye, Brock U)
• "The Problem of Meaning in Literature" (John Lye, Brock U)

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 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 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

More on Style and Mechanics

• 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.)
• 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 Guid

Of Particular Interest to Grad Students:

• HSU Library Services for Graduate Students
• The GradHacker blog at Inside Higher Ed (pre-2014 posts are at GradHacker.org)
• Pre-Professional Training:
  • MLA Committee on Community Colleges, "Considering Community Colleges: "Advice to Graduate Students and Job Seekers" ADE Bulletin 131 (Spring 2002)
  • John Guillory, "Preprofessionalism: What Graduate Students Want" ADE Bulletin 113 (Spring 1996)
  • Barry Sarchett, "Preprofessionalism and Disciplinarity" ADE Bulletin 133 (Winter 2003)
  • MLA's Surveys, Reports, and Other Documents, "Graduate Education and the Job Search"
  • David Laurence, "The Job Market and Graduate Education" ADE Bulletin 149 (2010)
  • Books from MLA and NCTE:
    • Academic Cultures: Professional Preparation and the Teaching Life
    • A Guide to Professional Development for Graduate Students in English
  • #Alt-Academy: para- and extra-academic careers
• Announcements/Calls for Papers/Fellowships & Grants:
  • Professional Resources from the MLA (MLA Commons)
  • Calls for Papers (U Penn)
• Research Methods:
  • Quantitative Methods (Coursera/U of Amsterdam)
  • Qualitative Methods (Coursera/U of Amsterdam)
  • Understanding Research Methods (Coursera/U of London/SOAS)