A.P. /C.P. English
Babcock
Guide to Embedding Quotes
There are at least 4 ways to integrate quotations.
1. Introduce the quotation with a complete sentence and a colon.
Example: In The Things They Carried, O’Brien states directly how Lt. Jimmy Cross
dealt with Lavender’s death: “On the morning after Ted Lavender died, First Lieutenant
Jimmy Cross crouched at the bottom of the foxhole and burned Martha’s letters.”
Example: O’Brien shows Mary Anne’s transformation in the Greenies’ hut: “On a post
at the rear of the hootch was the decayed head of a large black leopard.”
This is an easy rule to remember: if you use a complete sentence to introduce a
quotation, you need a colon after the sentence. Using a comma in this situation will most
likely create a comma splice, one of the serious sentence-boundary errors. Be careful not
to confuse a colon (:) with a semi-colon (;).
2. Use an introductory or explanatory phrase, but not a complete sentence,
separated from the quotation with a comma.
Example: In The Things They Carried, O’Brien states directly how Lt. Jimmy Cross
dealt with Lavender’s death when he says, “On the morning after Ted Lavender died,
First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross crouched at the bottom of the foxhole and burned Martha’s
letters.”
Example: “The average age in our platoon, I’d guess, was nineteen or twenty, and as a
consequence things often took on a curiously playful atmosphere, like a sporting event at
some exotic reform school,” O’Brien says in describing his friends.
Example: O’Brien remembers, “A field of elephant grass weighted with wind, bowing
under the stir of a helicopter’s blades, the grass dark and servile.”
Example: According to O’Brien, “What sticks to memory, often, are those odd little
fragments that have no beginning and no end.”
You should use a comma to separate your own words from the quotation or when
introducing a quotation with a phrase such as “According to O’Brien.”
3. Make the quotation a part of your own sentence without any any punctuation
between your own words and the words you are quoting.
Example: In The Things They Carried, O’Brien states that “On the morning after Ted
Lavender died, First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross crouched at the bottom of the foxhole and
burned Martha’s letters.”
Example: O’Brien explains that “I watched a man die on a trail near the village of My
Khe. I did not kill him. But I was present, you see, and my presence was guilt enough.”
Example: According to O’Brien, writing is “not a game. It’s a form.”
Notice that the word “that” is used in two of the examples above, and when it is used as it
is in the examples, “that” replaces the comma which would be necessary without “that”
in the sentence.
4. Use very short quotations—only a few words—as part of your own sentence.
Example: In The Things They Carried, O’Brien states “I want you to feel the truth”
because he wants the reader to “know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happeningtruth.”
Example: O’Brien believes that “the truths are contradictory” as “war is grotesque,” but
in actuality “war is also beauty.”
When you integrate quotations in this way, you do not use any special punctuation.
Instead, you should punctuate the sentence just as you would if all of the words were
your own.
All of the methods above for integrating quotations are correct, but you should avoid
relying too much on just one method. You should instead use a variety of methods.
Notice the punctuation!
Notice that there are only two punctuation marks that are used to introduce quotations:
the comma and the colon.