Integrating Quotations

1. Integrating Quotations NEVER just drop a quotation into your paper. Always introduce it and explain it with your own writing. There are three main ways to introduce quotations. These include:

2. 1. Introduce the quotation with a complete sentence and a COLON. Bob’s description of Madge emphasizes her fake appearance:“She was a peroxide blonde with a large-featured, overly made-up face, and she had a large, bright-painted, fleshy mouth” (Jones 14). Richard Wright explains his reasons for writing:“I was striving for a level of expression that matched those of the novels I read” (152).

3. 2. Use an introductory or explanatory phrase, but not a complete sentence, separated from the quotation with a COMMA. To describe his childlike consciousness, Wright explains,“Each event spoke with a cryptic tongue. And the moments of living slowly revealed their coded meanings” (42). After going to Memphis and boarding with Mrs. Moss, Wright wonders,“Was it wise to remain here with a seventeen-year-old girl eager for marriage and a mother equally anxious to have her marry me?” (67).

4. You should use a comma to separate your own words from the quotation when your introductory or explanatory phrase ends with a verb: Adds writes points out Claims denies asserts Emphasizes thinks notes Illustrates demonstrates argues Admits suggests insists You should also use a comma when you introduce a quotation with a phrase such as "According to” According to Thoreau, "We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us”

5. 3. Make the quotation part of your own sentence WITHOUT using any punctuation. As Bob is being beaten, he hopes he“will become unconscious but [he] can’t.” Bob appraises Mrs. Harrison derisively, stating that“she looked so complacent, sitting there in her two-hundred dollar chair [. . . ] bought with dough her husband had made overcharging poor hard-working colored people for his incompetent services, that I had a crazy impulse to needle her.”

6. 4. Use SHORT quotations--only a few words--as part of your own sentence. Thoreau argues that people blindly accept "shams and delusions" as the "soundest truths," while regarding reality as "fabulous." An Irish saying reminds us that friends that “gossip with you” may also be friends that gossip about you.

7. Punctuating Quotations Use an ellipsis. . . to indicate material omitted from the quotation. Hamlet tells Ophelia, "you jig and amble . . . and make your wantonness your ignorance" (III.i.140-142).

8. Punctuating Quotations Use brackets[ ] add words or modify the verb. Flaubert writes, "She looked carefully for the place where [Elizabeth] had entered the garden" (65). Flaubert says that "she [has] an excess of energy" (97).

9. Citing Quotes in Your Text Author’s last name and page number(s) of quote must appear in the text Romantic poetry is characterized by the“spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”(Wordsworth 263). Wordsworth stated that Romantic poetry was marked by a“spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”(263).

10. Citing Quote with No Author If no author is identified, use the title of the source—be sure to include proper punctuation. High school students admit they even feel the pressure to swear in some peer groups in order to “not get dissed” (“Profane Pressure”).

11. Block a quotation if it is four lines or longer. Indent the quotation one half of an inch on both sides, and punctuate it like the following example. Wright describes how his mother’s illness affected him: My mother’s suffering grew into a symbol in my mind, gathering to itself all the poverty, the ignorance, the helplessness; the painful, baffling, hunger-ridden days and hours; the restless moving, the futile seeking, the uncertainty, the fear, the dread. (Wright 29)

12. Credits The Citadel Writing and Learning Center by Amy Battle http://www.citadel.edu/citadel/otherserv/wctr/quotes.html#when Formatted and revised by Patricia Burgey