Integrating quotations in the body of your essay is actually surprisingly
difficult, and so I just want to talk a little bit about some common mistakes
that I often see, and these are mistakes that you'll want to avoid yourself. So I
am going to assume as we go through this that you know some of the basics of
quoting, and especially the idea that there are really three parts to a
properly integrated quote. These are the signal phrase (which is your words
introducing the quote) the quote itself, and then lastly some kind of citation
(and that is often a page number). So assuming that we know some of these
basics of quoting, let's go on to our first example here. Now as we look at
this, I have used straight quotation marks here, because that's all the
program allows me to do but if you are writing in Microsoft Word, as you should
do, then you should use curved quotation marks, and actually when I see these
straight quotes it's often a sign that people are plagiarizing and that they've
copied something from the web. If we look at these examples here each of these
examples is quoting a fairly short phrase from a novel by Charles Dickens,
and the thing to remember is that if you're quoting a phrase as opposed to a
complete sentence it's often best to run your signal
phrase directly into the quote without any intervening punctuation. So try
to follow this example, this last one, as opposed to these first two, which are
technically incorrect. You'll see that the first one is what we call a
formal introduction, which ends with a colon, and the second one is a short
signal phrase, which has a subject and a verb of expression (such as "writes," "argues,"
"suggests," and so forth. So just to repeat: try to use a running
signal phrase with a shorter quotation that's not a complete sentence. The
second example here shows another thing that's quite common and
this is where students try to cram as much information into their ...
signal phrase as possible. So we have here "On page 18," we refer to
an article, we give the title, and then we have the name. Typically all you need to
do in the run-up to the quotation is just provide the name. That's really all
you need to do. The only time that you really need to mention the title is if
you are for instance quoting from somebody multiple times, and this person
has written a number of works and you have to distinguish them, or if the title
is significant for some reason, or you're going to spend quite a bit of time on
this particular piece. But typically you don't need to give the title, and you
also don't need to give the page number or state where this is from. The author
is all you need, and then the citation can go after the quotation, which would
be page 18 in this case. Then we get rid of the final punctuation mark and we
replace it with a period after the citation. The third thing here is also
very common and this is where students introduce the quote by using the word
quote and then often afterwards they use the same word as well. Now this is
awkward for a number of reasons, in part because it suggests that in the original
text this was already a quotation, which it doesn't have to be. So a better word
for this would be something like "passage," or if you talk about poetry or something
like that "lines" would be good as well, or you can just totally rephrase
and say something about the quote that gives us a sense of what is going on.
The only time I would use "quote" is in the phrase "to quote" and then give the
critic's name or the author's name: "to quote X ..." and then give the quotation. But
even that is fairly casual and it's probably less common in academic writing.
Number four has to do with flattery, so you really
don't have to flatter the person you're quoting. And that includes
scholars, such as in the first example here, or authors if you're writing a
literary essay. You don't have to say that somebody is "notable" or a "scholar" or
as writing "memorably." These things you can you can really do without.
Number five: this is another common one in literature essays, and this is where
we have confused the author with the character. In this case it's not
Charles Dickens who is saying this in the text, but it's a character called
Wemmick. So we should say "Wemmick says," and then we have the quotation. So watch
out for that. I think this one's fairly easy to avoid. Just don't confuse the
author with the character. Number six (and we're almost done so hang in there) ...
number six is where we introduce the quote and then we keep going after the
quote. That's fine for fairly short quotations, but it's quite awkward for
longer one such as we have here. The other thing I often see is that people
use these present participles to introduce or keep going after a quote.
Another common one is "showing," so people will quote and then they'll say "showing
that blah blah blah blah blah." Avoid that. I find it very awkward and it's usually
best after a longer quotation just to put a period and start a new sentence.
Number seven: this is more just some general advice. Be careful where you
place your quotations. So if you think about a paragraph and you start your
paragraph with a topic sentence and you conclude it with some kind of observation,
it's typically best not to stick quotations at the beginning or end of a
paragraph, because what happens is that your voice is hidden a little bit and
the critic's voice or the author's voice sort of gets in the way. So if you want
to give structure to an essay or paragraph it's often best to make sure
that your voice is heard at the beginning and the end of a
paragraph. Although it's not technically wrong to put a quote there, you should be
cautious in terms of doing that/ And then we get to eight and nine here and this
has to do with block quotations. A block quotation is a fairly long
quotation (four or more lines if you're using the MLA guidelines) and my
suggestion would be that if you're introducing it, try to use something a
bit more extensive than just something like "he writes." In this example you can
see that a sentence after the quote really explains what the quote is about,
and what you're doing by putting this afterwards is you're making the reader
wait a long time before you sort of explain what the point of the quote is.
My suggestion would be to make sure that you put as much information before the
quote as you can, so that you can really help the reader understand what's coming
up. That just makes reading a lot easier. And then ...
another thing I often see is that after a block quotation for some reason people
indent what comes afterwards. But you really shouldn't start a new paragraph
right after a long block quote. You need to say something about the block
quotation: point out why it's significant, tie it to your other points, and then
start a new paragraph. Okay, so there's a lot more we could say about integrating
quotations (we could talk about making sure you give enough context to a
quote -- there's a lot of other things we can say) but I hope at least this video
shows you some of the most common mistakes to avoid.