The Art of Quotation Integration

A research paper is not simply a massive collection of quotations and paraphrased ideas glued together with a few transition phrases. Instead, it is an essay in which you offer your own thesis and ideas based on and supported by your research. Here are a few guidelines:

“Quotations, summaries, paraphrases, and facts will help you make your argument, but they cannot speak for you.” –From Diane Hacker

1.) Introduce ALL quotations.

All of your quotations should in some way identify the author (and their claim to authority, if necessary), the work and/or the context (this can be part of your lead in). In doing this, you need to use signal phrases to incorporate and blend in your reference material in a variety of ways. Do not merely drop direct quotations in next to your prose. Instead, lead them smoothly so that they obviously support or clarify what you are saying.

                    As one movie critic wrote, “This film is really terrible, and people should ignore it” (Ebert 14).

                    “This film is really terrible, and people should ignore it,” Ebert recommends in his Sun-Times review (14).

                    As Camile Paglia wrote in her book Individual Personae, “The individual cannot be understood because nature cannot be understood” (5).

                    Some scholars have claimed that “the individual cannot be understood because nature cannot be understood” (Paglia 5).

                    Lee Howard, a child psychologist, has written on how “violent cartoons lead to violent behavior” (13).

                    Kizza and Ssanyu observe that technology in the workplace has been accompanied by “an array of problems that need  quick answers” such as electronic monitoring to prevent security breaches (4).

                    As Rodriguez explains, “The billinguists insist that a child should be reminded… (9).

Make sure you do not quote excessively. Make sure quoted material is enclosed within quotation marks and quoted language is word-for-word accurate. In addition, make sure in-text citation follows the quotation.

If you do summaries or paraphrasing make sure they are free of plagiarized wording-not copied or half-copied from the source. Moreover, does a signal phrase mark the boundary between your words and the summary or paraphrase?

Do NOT start or end a paragraph with a quotation; make sure there is a reason you are using another’s idea at that particular place in the essay. It should belong there and support your point. Never use a direct quotation as a way to avoid thinking. All quotes must be selected purposefully, introduced intelligently and tailored to fit your own language.

Never place two direct quotations together without explanation of its significance in between.

2.) Introduce quotations with the correct punctuation.

Use commas for brief, informal, grammatically incomplete introductions. Use colons to separate your own grammatically complete introductions or statements (complete sentences) from quotations.

                    According to Smith, “The classic disease concept of alcoholism is unquestionably a hindrance rather than a help in addressing the broad problems of heavy drinking in our society” (4).

                    Smith states his opinion bluntly: “The classic disease concept of alcoholism is unquestionably a hindrance rather than a help in addressing the broad problems of heavy drinking in our society” (4).

                    According to Smith, looking at alcoholism as a disease is “a hindrance rather than a help” (4).

Use italics for titles of books, quotation marks around essays, article titles, etc.

3.) Keep all tenses the same.

Change the tenses in the quotation to correspond to your tenses, putting your words in brackets.

For example, the following sentence would be incorrect: While the legislators cringe at the sudden darkness, “all eyes were turned to Abraham Davenport.” Cringe is in the present tense, while “were turned” is in the past. By using brackets, you can make the sentence grammatically correct:

While the legislators cringe at the sudden darkness, “all eyes [turn] to Abraham Davenport.”

Use present tense when writing about a text (For example, Comp argues that…)

4.) Use ellipses if the whole quote does not need to be cited.

To condense a quoted passage, you can use the ellipsis mark (three periods, with spaces between) to indicate you have omitted words.

In quoting a passage, you will frequently want to omit words, phrases or sentences that are not useful to your paper. Whenever you omit material from a quoted passage, you should be fair to the author’s ideas and it should remain grammatically correct.

                    In surveying various responses to plagues in the Middle Ages, Barbara Tuchman writes, “Medical thinking. . . stressed air as the communicator or disease, ignoring sanitation or visible carriers” (113-14).

5.) Make sure your support is in the paper, not still in your head or back in the original source.

Sometimes when you’ve read a number of persuasive facts in an article or book, it’s easy to forget that your reader does not know them as well as you do now.

6.) Do not let reference material dominate your paper.

You will not be allowed to cite any quotation in your paper that needs to be indented or undergo another format; in other words, no quotes longer than four lines. Paraphrase whenever possible, or better yet, use your own ideas.

But, do not let your evidence be the VOICE of your paper; don’t let it dominate the flow. Let you voice be the catalyst and let the evidence you find support YOUR voice/perspective/insight, etc.

Source:

http://arapahoe.littletonpublicschools.net/Portals/7/Language%20Arts/Comp/The%20Art%20of%20Quotation%20Integration.pdf