Being able to use quotations well is the mark of a skilled writer. Quotations serve as evidence or illustrations to support the various points of your argument/explanation, but above all, your use of them demonstrates your ability to do close writings, to analyze and to interpret the language of a text--whether it be literature, history, philosophy, whatever. The following guidelines are intended to help you understand the logic and the mechanics of quoting from a text. (All examples are taken from Life in the Iron Mills by Rebecca Harding Davis.)
A. It is often better to choose keys or phrases to support your ideas than to quote whole sentences or worse, whole paragraphs. Beginning writers tend to over-quote. Using a sentence when a phrase will do, however, or using a paragraph when a sentence will do results in windy, flabby prose. It can make an assay boring to read and hard to follow because it buries your own ideas, which should be the focus of the essay, under a pile of unnecessary words. The following is a good example of economical quoting:
This discussion of Wolfe's delusion about Mitchell takes almost a page of Life in the Iron Mills, but the writer of this essay rightly chose only the key phrase to make his or her point.Hugh Wolfe perceives Mitchell to be "a Man all-knowing, all-seeing," but the narrator tells us that Wolfe's perceptions are only "the phantoms of his heated, ignorant fancy" (40).
B. Try to incorporate quotations into your own sentences rather than giving one of your own sentences, then quoting a sentence, then another of your own sentences, then quoting, etc. By incorporating quotations into your own writing, you can avoid unnecessary repetition of information. Consider the following:
Now look at how this passage can be revised to make the same point more economically:The narrator wants us to see Wolfe as he really is so that we can judge him fairly. See him just as he is, that you may judge him justly when you hear the story of this night" (25).
C. At times you might feel that you can best illustrate or support the point you are trying to make by quoting an entire sentence. At such times, state your point and introduce the quoted sentence with a colon:We are asked to see Wolfe "just as he is" so that we many "judge him justly" when we have heard his story (25).
The colon signals the relationship between the first half of the sentence (your claim) and the second half (an illustration from the text).Hugh has been physically and psychologically devastated as a result of the harsh working conditions at the mill: "he had already lost the strength and instinctive vigor of a man, his muscles were then, his nerves weak..." (24).
D. Sometimes you might even find that you want to give a longer quotation, more than one sentence, if the passage itself would be more forceful than a paraphrase or if its exact words are necessary to make your point. When you do this, be sure you state your point, your interpretation of the passage, before you quote it. Don't make your reader wade through a lengthy quotation wondering what its purpose is. In the following example, we can see how Davis asks her readers to identify with the workers in her story:
Remember, if you are spacing a passage of more than three typed lines, you need to indent (10 spaces) the left margin (not the right). Moreover, you do not need quotation marks if you indent. The indentation clearly indicates the quotation; quotation marks would be redundant; omit them. However, if the quoted passage is or contains spoken dialogue (a character's speech), then use single quotation marks at the beginning and end of that dialogue. The following indented quotation from the text, for example, contains a direct quotation of Deb's speech, rightly set off with quotation marks:Are the pain and jealousy less savage realities down here in this place I am taking you to, than in your own house or your own heart, --your heart, which they clutch at sometimes? (23).
E. The Mechanics of Quoting(P)erhaps, if she had possessed an artist's eye, the picturesque oddity of the scene might have made her stagger less, and the path seem shorter; but to her the mills were only ‘summat devlish to look at by might.' (19-20)
To alleviate the cumbersome process of
footnoting every time you quote from a text, use parenthetical page number
documentation, as illustrated throughout this handout. Simply place
the appropriate page number (or line number, in quoting poetry) in parenthesis
at
the end of the sentence or, if necessary to avoid confusion, after
some other decisive pause in the sentence, marked by a coma, a semi-colon,
or a colon.
1) The parentheses go after the final
set of quotation marks and before the final punctuation:
Note that (using the MLA method of documentation) we do not place a "p" before the page number. Use the number only. (When quoting poetry, however, abbreviate line with "1." and lines "11." to indicate the line number in parenthesis.)"I am not one of them" (39). [period]
"I am not one of them" (39), [coma]
"I am not one of them" (39); [semi-colon]
"I am not one of them" (39): [colon]
2) Because you want to focus only on key words and to omit unnecessary ones when quoting, you might find that you want to leave out part of a direct quotation. When you change a quotation in this way, you must use an ellipsis mark (three spaced periods, in brackets: [. . .]) to take the place of the omitted words. Consider the following passage:
If you want to support your point that Wolfe had been psychologically and physically damaged by his work, you don't really need the reference to "a meek-woman's face" (this allusion would have somewhat make a somewhat different point.) If you left out that phrase, you would need to replace it with an ellipsis, within brackets, like this:He had already lost the strength and instinct vigor of a man, his muscles were thin, his nerves weak, his face (a meek-woman's face) haggard, yellow with consumption (24).
a. The ellipsis mark is best used in the middle of a quoted passage to show that something has been omitted. If you are only quoting a phrase from a sentence, or are obviously coming in the middle of the sentence, you do not need to use the ellipsis.He had already lost the strength and instinct vigor of a man, his muscles were thin, his nerves weak, his face [. . .] haggard, yellow with consumption (24).
b. BE FAIR TO THE TEXT. Do not leave out any word or words that would change the meaning of the quotation. If Life in the Iron Mills, for example, one of the statements that best characterizes Mitchell's attitude is "I am not one of them." If you omitted the word "not" from this quote ("I am . . . one of them"), you would be seriously distorting the meaning of the text.
3) Sometimes you need to change a quotation by adding a word or words for clarification or grammatical correctness. When you do this, you must use brackets to show that the have changed the original quotation. This is most often done to make the quotation fit the grammar of your sentence. For example, Davis tells the reader to "hide your disgust." If you wanted to quote this passage and to be consistent in your use of pronouns, you might use the following sentence:
You might also use brackets to indicate that you have changed the tense of a verb, again to fit the grammar of your own sentence:The narrator asks us to "hide [our] disgust." (13).
Because the writer of this essay is rightly using the present tense to describe a work in literature, he or she has changed the verb to make the entire sentence grammatically consistent.When we first me Wolfe, we see that he has "already lost the strength and instinct vigor of a man, his muscles [are] thin" (24).
Finally, you might have to add a noun, in brackets, to the quoted sentence in order to identify the person or thing to whom a pronoun refers, if it is not already clear from the context: The narrator wants us to "see [Wolfe] just as he is" (25).
4) When you are quoting from poetry, you need to use a slash to indicate the line break: "Is this the end?/O Life, as futile, then, as frail!" (11). When you are quoting three or more lines of poetry, indent the left margin, single space, and duplicate the spatial arrangement of the original lines of poetry as accurately as possible:
Is this the end?
O Life, as futile, then, as frail!
What hope of answer or redress?
(11)
F. Bibliographic DocumentationBuffalo Bill's
defunct
who used to
ride a watersmooth-silver
stallion . . .
Current MLA practice requires a Works Cited page, on which you list (in alphabetical order, and using proper bibliographic form) all works from which you have quoted or paraphrased. See the most recent addition of the MLA Handbook or one of many English handbooks for specifics.