In This Chapter
Academic writing is well sourced writing, and academic writers draw from and include sources in their writing to provide concrete, clear, and compelling evidence for their arguments.
We have already seen how writers can use summary in their writing to provide context for an academic conversation or to provide a brief, accurate overview of a source. In addition to summary, academic writers also use quotation and paraphrase to integrate their research into their writing. Writers use summary, quote, and paraphrase to support their points and to persuade their readers.
Your college instructors will not expect you to be an expert on the topic of of any essay or writing assignment you may complete. Instead, they expect that you will rely on research–especially secondary sources such as books, articles, and websites– to inform your writing. They will expect you to present your research in the form of quotes and paraphrases.
This chapter will discuss the form of source integration that you are likely already familiar with: quotation. The next chapter will discuss a more advanced form of source integration also necessary for college-level writing: paraphrase.
For complete information about quoting and citing in MLA Format, consult the Purdue OWL Website
What Is a Quotation?
A quotation is a direct restatement of the exact words from the original source. Any time you use three or more words as they appeared in the original source, you should treat it as a quote.
Features of Integrated Quotations
Quotes Are Exact Replications
Quotations must replicate the source material exactly. Writers must not make any changes to the wording, spelling, or phrasing of the original source.
Sometimes, in order to smoothly integrate quoted material into your paper, you may need to remove a word or add a word to make the quote make sense. If you make any change to quoted material, it must be formatted correctly using an ellipsis (for words removed) or brackets (for words added).
Any added emphasis on words within the quote must be noted as well.
Quotes Must Be Introduced
When using a quotation to support an argument, writers must first introduce the source of the quotation to their reader. This is especially true the first time a source is used in a text. Writers should never simply drop in a quote without providing clear context for where that quotation came from.
Quotes Must Be Notated with Quotation Marks
This feature may seem obvious, but all quoted material must be noted with quotation marks. Be sure to use the double quotation mark on your keyboard and not the single apostrophe. Place all punctuation inside the quotation marks.
Quotes Must Be Analyzed and Explained
Just as writers should not drop quotes into their essays without carefully introducing them, writers must also analyze or explain the quote’s importance. Once you have completed the quote, it is important to write back to the quotation and explain to your own reader why the evidence is important to the argument you are presenting. You may also want to analyze how the quotation relates to other evidence you have already presented.
Quotes Must Use Parenthetical Citation.
MLA Style requires that all quotes are cited with the author’s last name and page number in parenthetical citations within the text. See the Purdue OWL website for more specific information about formatting quotations.
When to Quote
The question of when to quote depends on the specific context of the writing and the effect you are trying to achieve. Learning the best times to quote and paraphrase takes practice and experience.
In general, it is best to use a quote when:
- The exact words of your source are important for the point you are trying to make. This is especially true if you are quoting technical language, terms, or very specific word choices.
- You want to highlight your agreement with the author’s words. If you agree with the point the author of the evidence makes and you like their exact words, use them as a quote.
- You want to highlight your disagreement with the author’s words. In other words, you may sometimes want to use a direct quote to indicate exactly what it is you disagree about. This might be particularly true when you are considering the antithetical positions in your research writing projects.
In general, it is best to paraphrase when:
- There is no good reason to use a quote to refer to your evidence. If the author’s exact words are not especially important to the point you are trying to make, you are usually better off paraphrasing the evidence.
- You are trying to explain a particular a piece of evidence in order to explain or interpret it in more detail. This might be particularly true in writing projects like critiques.
- You need to balance a direct quote in your writing. You need to be careful about directly quoting your research too much because it can sometimes make for awkward and difficult to read prose. So, one of the reasons to use a paraphrase instead of a quote is to create balance within your writing.
Effective Quotations
Effective quotation provides source language to support a writer’s argument when the wording of the quote is essential to the meaning of the text. The most effective quotations will be clearly introduced, so the reader understand the importance of the source the quote came from. Effective quotations will be clearly explained and connected to the larger argument being made or other evidence that has already been presented.
Example:
In his seminal work, David Bartholomae argues that “Every time a student sits down to write for us, he has to invent the university for the occasion-invent the university…”(4).
Be sure to be careful when directly quotes because failing to write the text exactly as it appears in the original text is not an ethical use of direct quotes. Also, failing to bracket the quote with quotation marks and/or citing it inside the text is also unethical and both mistakes are a form of plagiarism.
Integrating Quotes into Your Writing
Providing Context for Quotes
The first step toward responsible quote use is to meet the minimum requirements for the citation style you are using. For MLA Citation Style, this includes providing the author’s name and page number (if applicable) within the body of the text and providing the bibliographic source information in the Works Cited page.
But for effective source integration, it is not enough to simply meet the minimum requirements. Instead, writers must provide context and analysis of the quotations they use.
The following example shows how a writer can integrate a quote poorly despite meeting the minimum requirements of the citation rules.
Example of a Poorly Integrated Source
There are many positive effects for advertising prescription drugs on television. “African-American physicians regard direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription medicines as one way to educate minority patients about needed treatment and healthcare options” (Wechsler, Internet).
In the above example, the writer has used quotation marks and included the author’s last name. Because it is clearly a source from the internet, page numbers are not available or required.
This is a potentially good piece of information to support a research writer’s claim, but the researcher hasn’t done any of the necessary work to explain where this quote comes from or to explain why it is important for supporting her point. Rather, she has simply “dropped in” the quote, leaving the interpretation of its significance up to the reader.
Now consider this revised example of how this quote could be better introduced into the essay:
Revised Example of Well Introduced Source
In her Pharmaceutical Executive article, Jill Wechsler writes about one of the positive effects of advertising prescription drugs on television. “African-American physicians regard direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription medicines as one way to educate minority patients about needed treatment and healthcare options.”
In this revision, it’s much more clear what point the writer is trying to make with this evidence and where this evidence comes from.
In this particular example, the passage is from a traditional print journal called Pharmaceutical Executive. In this case, it is not necessary to indicate that the article was accessed online because the location of the source does not affect the reader’s understanding of it. A reader should be able to locate that source information through the Works Cited page. Whether the article was accessed in print or electronically does not have an impact on the source’s authority or relevance.
If you are using an internet sources where the publication information may have an impact on the source’s authority or relevance, you should reference that information in your introduction of the source. For instance, if you are drawing information from a government website or professional organization’s homepage, you would want to state the publication information of the source.
You must provide context the first time you use any source. After the first reference, you can use just the last name of the writer.
Example of Subsequent Source Reference:
Wechsler also reports on the positive effects of advertising prescription drugs on television. She writes…
Notice how the above example uses the word “also.” This word functions as a transitional word. It reminds the reader that Wechsler has already been introduced and it creates a connection between the earlier and later information.
Providing Analysis of Quotations
It is not enough to simply provide citations for a quote. Effectively integrating a quotation requires writers to explain the significance of each quotation to their reader.
This goes far beyond simply including a signal phrase. Explaining the significance means indicating how the quoted material supports the point you are making in that paragraph.
Remember: just because you add a quote does not mean that you have made your point. Quotes never speak for themselves. How and why does that quoted material make the point you think it does?
Here are some helpful phrases for explaining quoted materials. “X” is the author’s last name
- (quoted material). What X’s point demonstrates is that . . .
- (quoted material). Here, X is not simply stating _______, she is also demonstrating __________.
- (quoted material). This is an example of _____ because _______.
- (quoted material). This statement clearly shows ______ because _______.
Try to begin each paragraph, precede each quote, follow each quote, and end each paragraph. Quotes that are integrated well into a paper allow you to control the paper. That is what a reader wants to see: your ideas and the way that you engage sources to shape and discuss your ideas.
Incorporating Sources Grammatically
Because you should integrate every quotation with some sort of contextual information, each quotation should be an element inside one of your own sentences. No quotation should not stand alone.
Example of an incorrect placement of quotation:
The author wrote about conditions for nurses during World War I. “One of the most stabbing things in this war is seeing the lines of empty motor ambulances going up to bring down the wrecks who at this moment are sound and fit” (Burton 441).
Notice that the quotation stands alone. It is not an element within one of the writer’s sentences. Some beginning writers might try to correct the problem by changing the period after “World War II” to a comma. However, that simply tacks one sentence to the end of another and creates a punctuation error. Instead, each quotation must work within the grammar of one of your sentences.
Place Quote After a Verb of Expression
One way to make a quotation work with sentence grammar is to place it after a verb of expression.
Example of using verb of expression:
The author states, “One of the most stabbing things in this war is seeing the lines of empty motor ambulances going up to bring down the wrecks who at this moment are sound and fit” (Burton 498).
Place Quote within Larger Sentence
A quoted phrase can play any number of roles in the grammar of a sentence: verb, subject or object, adjective or adverb. Look at the example below and pretend that there are no quotation marks. Would the sentence still be grammatical? Yes. That shows that the quoted material works with the grammar of the sentence.
Example of placing quote within a larger sentence:
The nurse makes the ambulances sound like tow trucks going to retrieve demolished vehicles when she writes that it was horrible to watch “empty motor ambulances going up to bring down the wrecks” of men (Burton 72).
To integrate a quotation into a sentence, omitting words from the source is acceptable if you follow two rules:
- use ellipses (…) to signal the omission
- avoid distorting the source’s meaning.
It is also acceptable to adjust capitalization and grammar provided that you follow two rules:
- use brackets [ ] to signal the change a
- avoid distorting the source’s meaning.
Examples of adjusting capitalization:
Lessig argues against the position that “[f]ile sharing threatens… the ability of creators to earn a fair return from their creativity” (Lessig 203).
When he wrote his book, nearly everyone in the music industry felt that “[f]ile sharing threaten[ed]…the ability of creators to earn a fair return from their creativity” (Lessig 203).
Punctuating Quotations
Place quotation marks at the start and the end of direct quotations unless the quotation is long enough to justify the use of the block quotation format (four complete lines of text or more). Do not use block quotes if there are less than four complete lines of text. In general, for essays under 10 pages, use block quotes very sparingly.
When Using Parenthetical Citations
The parenthetical citation shows your reader where your quotation or paraphrase ends. Parenthetical citations are not part of the quote and they should not be included inside the quotation marks. In-text citations are inserted after the final quotation marks.
If the quotation immediately follows a verb capturing the act of expression, place a comma after the verb:
Example of Correctly Punctuated Citation:
As the author wrote, “A free culture has been our past, but it will only be our future if we change the path we are on right now” (Lessig 287).
Notice in the above example that the citation appears after the closed quotation mark. There is a single space between the quotation mark and the open parenthesis.
The period (or ending punctuation) is placed after the citation. This is to show that the citation is a part of the sentence that includes the quotation.
For complete information about quoting and citing in MLA Format, consult the Purdue OWL Website
Remixed From: How and Why to Cite by Katelyn Burton; Quoting, Paraphrasing, and Avoiding Plagiarism by Steven D. Krause; 11.2 Quoting by Melanie Gagich; Write What Matters by Liza Long; Amy Minervini; and Joel Gladd
This chapter contains material from “About Writing: A Guide” by Robin Jeffrey, OpenOregon Educational Resources, Higher Education Coordination Commission: Office of Community Colleges and Workforce Development is licensed under CC BY 4.0
It also contains an excerpt from David Bartholomae’s “Inventing the University.”