Writing and Incorporating
Quotes Effectively
Why use quotes?
 A quote is the exact wording of a statement from a
source.
 Quotes make an essay more believable; they are
evidence you can use to support your thesis.
 Opinions supported by quoted text are evidence of
good reading and thoughtful responses.
Direct Quotes
 Incorporating another person's exact words into your
own writing.
 Use direct quotations when the source material uses
language that is particularly striking or notable. Do not
rob such language of its power by altering it.
 Use direct quotations when the author you are quoting
has coined a term unique to her or his research and
relevant within your own paper.
 Use quotation marks.
Indirect Quotes
 Are not the author’s exact wording, but instead a paraphrasing or
summarizing.
 Use when you need to:
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Summarize key incidents or details of the text.
Express a fact stated by the source.
Clarify a quote that is too long, confusing, or dull.
Condense the idea of several direct quotes.
 Indirect quotes still require proper citations. You will be plagiarizing if
you don’t cite.
 Do not change the meaning of a quote when you paraphrase or
summarize.
 If a direct quote is very long or boring, use an indirect or partial quote
instead.
Punctuation is IMPORTANT
 To avoid confusing your readers, punctuate
quotations correctly, and work them smoothly
into your writing.
 Punctuation shows your readers:
• which words are yours
• which words you have quoted
How to Punctuate:
 The author’s exact words go inside the quotation
marks: “I am super, duper cool.”
 Typically, the ending punctuation (period, exclamation
point, question mark) will go inside the closing
quotation marks, unless the quote is embedded within
another sentence.
 If a question relates to the sentence and not to the
original quote, place it at the end of the sentence
outside the quotation marks.
 What kind of moron says, “I am super, duper cool”?
Punctuating Quotations
 Quoting a Sentence or Sentences:
 Gene begins to reveal his internal war with Finny
when he says, “What was I doing up here anyway?
Why did I let Finny talk me into stupid things like
this?” (5).
 Notice how my words (Gene begins to reveal his
internal war with Finny when he says) lead into the
quote I have chosen to use.
Punctuating Quotations
 Quoting a Fragment:
 Jack is not able to kill the piglet during their first
attempt at hunting for food “because of the enormity
of the knife descending and cutting into the living
flesh; because of the unbearable blood” (31).
 Again, notice how my words lead into the quote.
Quoting a Quotation
 Use single quotation marks to indicate a
quote inside of a quote:
 Ron said,“Dad yelled, ‘No way!’”
 Golding writes, “Jack seized the conch.
‘Ralph’s right of course. There isn’t a
snake-thing. But if there was a snake we’d
hunt it and kill it.’” (36).
Quotations with Brief Insertions
 To clarify or modify a phrase within a quote, insert
brackets around your addition.
 “Slowly, [Bob] reached for the meat cleaver.”
 It is evident that Finny believes in the war before his fall
from the tree because he tells Gene, “I’m wearing this
[his pink shirt] as an emblem. We haven’t got a flag,
we can’t float Old Glory proudly out the window. So I’m
going to wear this, as an emblem” (11).
Integrating Quotations
 When you are using brief quotations, you must
integrate them—
 Never just drop a quotation into your paper. Always
introduce it and explain it with your own
analysis/commentary.
 You must:
 work them smoothly into your sentences
 show their relevance to your ideas.
 Three main ways to introduce quotations:
st
1
Method: As Part of Your
Sentence
 Incorporate the quotation into your sentence,
punctuating it just as you would if it was not a
quotation, adding quotation marks.
 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.”
 Final Position
 For several reasons, “all of them, all except Phineas,
constructed at infinite cost to themselves these Maginot Lines
against an enemy they thought they saw across the frontier.”
 Beginning Position
 “Ralph wept for the end of innocence, the darkness of man’s
heart, and the fall through the air of the true, wise friend called
Piggy,” declares Golding’s narrator at the end of his novel.
 Middle Position
 In the same way William Golding’s novel has been considered
a “body of work that speaks to the tragedy of the human
condition,”John Knowles’ A Separate Peace can be
considered a work of literature that shines a light into the dark
recesses of the human heart.
 Interrupted
 “As flies to wanton boys, are we to the
gods,”proclaims King Lear, “– They kill us for
their sport." This proclamation by an old king
who has just realized that everything he once
held dear—territory and power–has been
stripped from him by his own flesh and blood–
daughters Regan and Goneril–is said to have
inspired the title of William Golding’s Nobel Prize
winning novel, Lord of the Flies.
2nd Method: Attribution
 Introduce the quote by using an attributive tag, such as
he writes, she claims, etc.
 To describe his childlike consciousness, Wright explains,
“Each event spoke with a cryptic tongue. And the
moments of living slowly revealed their coded meanings.”
 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?”
3rd Method: Introduce w/Colon
 Introduce the quotation by writing a full sentence and
colon to introduce the sentence, which should itself be
a full sentence.
 Bob’s description of Madge emphasizes her appearance:
“She was a peroxide blonde with a large-featured, overly
made-up face, and she had a large, bright-painted, fleshy
mouth.”
 Richard Wright explains his reasons for writing: “I was
striving for a level of expression that marched those of the
novels I read.”
Not Integrated
 Brinker becomes disillusioned with the
war, and Ralph becomes disillusioned
with the glory of being chief. “He found
himself understanding the
wearisomeness of this life, where every
path was an improvisation and a
considerable part of one’s walking life
was spent watching one’s feet” (76).
Integrated
 In the same way that Brinker becomes
disillusioned with the war, Ralph begins to
feel a sense of disillusionment toward the
glory of being chief. Golding’s narrator
begins to allude to Ralph’s waning
enjoyment of being the leader on the island
when he states, “he found himself
understanding the wearisomeness of this
life, where every path was an improvisation
and a considerable part of one’s walking life
was spent watching one’s feet” (76).
Block Quotations
 Block a quotation if it is 4 lines or longer.
 Indent a quotation 10 spaces (tab x2) and punctuate as
follows:
 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)
Works Cited
 If the author is introduced at the beginning of the
sentence:
 According to researcher, Carl Smithton, “95%
of all cats prefer love seats instead of bean bag
chairs” (95).
 If not,
 Research has shown that “95% of all cats
prefer love seats instead of bean bag chairs”
(Smithton 95).
Titles
 Use quotation marks to indicate the title of a shorter
work, such as an article, essay, short story, poem,
song, or speech.
 In his essay, “Potatoes are Yummy,” Joe Smith argues
that…
 Use italics (or underline when handwriting) for longer
works, such as a book, magazine, album, play, film, or
epic poem.
 In her novel, Potatoes are Yucky, Ann Smith argues
that…
Example
Ray Bradbury uses repetition to reinforce main ideas in
his writing. For example, in the short story“All Summer in
a Day,” Bradbury attempts to make the reader understand
the magnitude of seven years worth of rain by writing that
the children “glanced out at the world that was raining
now and raining and raining steadily” (56). This quote
shows that while Bradbury knows his audience is familiar
with rain, the concept of seven years of constant rain is so
unimaginable that it must be repeated. It also emphasizes
the continuous and monotonous nature of long and
steady rainfalls.