Writers often use quotations from sources to support and develop their own claims and arguments. Less experienced writers risk letting other authors’ words, ideas, and claims overwhelm their own, or use quotations out of context in ways that are confusing or change the author’s original meaning. Common problems include the following:
Example:
Theater critic Rohan Preston observes, “Director Lou Bellamy has a way of looking so deeply into the theatergoer’s soul that audience members often call out involuntarily to characters—responding to their queries and whims, offering advice and succor.”Example:
According to theater critic Rohan Preston, “Director Lou Bellamy has a way of looking so deeply into the theatergoer’s soul that audience members often call out involuntarily to characters—responding to their queries and whims, offering advice and succor.”Example:
Although there are “procedural aspects related to the measurement of conditioned inhibition of fear potentiated startle,” Engelmann argues that researchers should also be concerned with “the actual conditioning procedure that is used” during training (35).
argues | demonstrates |
agrees | emphasizes |
asserts | illustrates |
claims | implies |
comments | observes |
compares | notes |
declares | responds |
disagrees | states |
disputes | suggests |
Example:
Rohan Preston suggests that Bellamy is a skillful director because he “has a way of looking so deeply into the theatergoer’s soul that audience members often call out involuntarily to characters.”
Example:
Preston demonstrates that Director Lou Bellamy knows how to get the audience involved: “members often call out involuntarily to characters—responding to their queries and whims, offering advice and succor.”
This practice will help your readers understand what is significant about the quotation. You can paraphrase the quotation, and/or you can draw readers’ attention to significant words and phrases by quoting them in your sentence.
Example:
In her study of Division I student-athletes, ethnographer Julie Cheville notes the identity-related challenges that come with playing a team sport: “the perpetual dilemma for players and coaches is to recognize and sustain identities of difference in the midst of public pressures to be the same and conceptual pressures to think the same” (55). In other words, student-athletes must struggle to maintain their own senses of self while still integrating seamlessly into the team. Student-athletes are not the only ones involved in this identity struggle; rather, “public pressures” and “conceptual pressures” can work against their own and their coaches’ abilities to see them as individuals.
Example:
Engelmann summarizes a current theory about the relationship between learning and anxiety disorders: “When these [learning] processes fail to work properly… , a state of chronic fear or anxiety may develop because the animal cannot discriminate between periods of safety and danger” (1-2).
For more information
Hacker, Diana, and Nancy Sommers. A Writer’s Reference. 7th ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2011. Print. 379–385, 505–510.
“Incorporating Quotations into Sentences.” UW-Madison Writing Center Writer’s Handbook. UW-Madison Writing Center, 2009. Web. 13 Jun. 2012.
Works Cited
Cheville, Julie. Minding the Body: What Student Athletes Know About Learning. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 2001. Print.
Engelmann, J.M. “Backward Conditioning with Single or Multiple Unconditioned Stimulus Presentations Measured by Fear-Potentiated Startle in Rats.” Honors Thesis. University of Minnesota, 2005. Print.
Preston, Rohan. “Audience Can’t Help Talking Back to the Incisive ‘Diva Daughters.’” Star Tribune 15
Feb. 2004: 4B. Print.