Quotations are a minefield. There are a thousand ways to go wrong—putting too much stress on quotations, quoting too much, quoting the wrong passages, blurring the line between your voice and those of the sources you quote, disrupting the flow of your argument, and so on. This section of Nuts and Bolts presents generic advice on how to quote effectively. Read it in tandem with the next sections on specific documentation styles. In this section I have followed MLA documentation style, but the examples could easily be adapted to Chicago or other styles.

Quotations and proof

Within the world of college essays, quotations rarely "prove" anything. What good quotations usually do is support a particular interpretation. Yet one of the most frequent mistakes college writers make is to say that a particular quotation "proves" some claim. Here are some verbs that persuade better than prove:

Suppose for instance you're writing an essay on women in the workplace, and you find a damning quotation from some CEO: "Women just don't make good bosses, and I don't want them messing up my company." Here are the wrong and right way to comment on this choice bit after quoting it:

The original tries to get too much from the quotation. It's just one comment, after all, not data on the workplace at large. Stylistically, notice the change in attribution, from This quotation to Smith's comment, a change in keeping with the Nuts and Bolts principle of attaching actions to real actors).

Accuracy

Rule # 1 for quotations: get the words right. Before I started teaching I wouldn't have thought I'd need to say this, but a great many students seem to think it's okay to get the gist of a quotation, and not sweat every apostrophe. That is not in fact okay: like it or not, academics are fanatics about word-for-word accuracy.

What if the original quoted passage has a mistake in it? Reproduce the misspelled word, and, to notify the reader that this mistake occurred in the original, follow it with the word sic in brackets (it's Latin for thus or so, here signifying "it was like this already"):

If you need to change anything else in the quotation or add some comment within it, indicate your change or addition by using square brackets [this], not parentheses (not this).

Sometimes word-for-word accuracy by itself may lead to an unclear quotation. In the following sentence from an original text, to what do the pronouns them and themselves refer?

Women, it's not too hard to figure out, but if you don't explain this readers will hit the pronouns like unexpected speedbumps. You may use brackets to insert an explanation:

Don't get bracket-happy. Use them sparingly. A better general technique for explaining terms in quotations is to introduce them or explain them after the fact, depending on how your argument unfolds and what will work best for the reader, in your judgment (for more on this see Integrating quotations below):

Note that 18th-century usage permitted Wollstonecraft to use a semi-colon where we would require a comma. The quotation does not try to correct this.

Quoting too much

Quoting too much is one of the commonest mistakes inexperienced writers make, as if they think it's disrespectful to an original text to cut it into small pieces. But there's nothing disrespectful about helping a quote make an emphatic point. Whenever you quote, be aware of what you're looking for, and try to seize upon a sharp and pithy excerpt:

One needn't go as far as Ralph Waldo Emerson's flat-out disdain for quotations, but make sure that your essays don't look like patchwork quilts. Be selective in the quotations you use, and be selective in what you quote from them, keeping only the heart of the quotation as much as possible and keeping the rest of the paper in your own voice and words.

Strong quotations

The best way to build a strong argument is to know the kind of argument a particular discipline (or teacher) expects, and to have good material on which to build. It's important to find the best quotations, the ones that really serve your purpose. Students often gather quotations in a desultory fashion, jumping about the text, stopping when they have what they deem a sufficient number, and then forcing these into an essay regardless of how well they really fit. But there's no shortcut to good research. An important part of the process is going through texts with a fine-tooth comb, reading not only for comprehension but for choice phrases. You should expect to end up with many more quotations than you'll actually end up using in your essay. One tip: teachers will often point out many of the best passages, so keeping track in class can prove helpful come essay (and exam) time.

The problem of clarity

When you use quotations, you're letting someone else speak in the middle of your discourse. That has its uses, of course, but it also risks confusing your reader about who's speaking and what relation the quoted words have to your own argument. Student writers are often oblivious to this risk because they're not used to looking at what they've written from a reader's point of view. But consider the problems your reader faces. He encounters quotations used for many different purposes: to support or amplify an argument, to raise a new point, to present a point of disagreement. Don't assume your reader will know why you're using a particular quotation.

There are two main problems of clarity in using quotations: (1) Distinguishing your own argument from the arguments of various quoted passages; and (2) making sure the reader understands what a quotation is expected to accomplish.

1. Distinguishing your own argument from the argument of a quotation

Often you'll wish to use quotations to summarize positions with which you'll disagree a little or a lot. This is especially likely to happen when you're surveying past studies or perspectives as a way of laying the groundwork for your own argument. Here's how one prominent literary critic, Stephen Greenblatt, deals with previous approaches to Shakespeare's plays:

Greenblatt wishes to call attention to the "conflict," as he calls it, between these two views of Shakespeare (conservative or radical). He's not trying to argue that one or the other view is right, and so he crafts the passage to give each view equal weight. In the larger essay from which this excerpt is taken, Greenblatt develops his own perspective, an interpretive model that stresses "negotiation" and ambivalence rather than imposed and settled meaning.

Sometimes one will want to use a controversial source. The best tack is to set up the quotation in such a way that you show understanding of the controversy:

The original presents Goldhagen's words without any cognizance of the controversy surrounding his argument. The revision, by contrast, takes note of the controversy. It may now go on to agree or disagree with Goldhagen, or take a more nuanced view. The key point is that it's created space for the writer's own view, rather than crowding that view and the quotation's perspective together.

2. Explaining the point or sense of a quotation

The other main problem of clarity that arises with quotations is to explain a quoted passage's point. This is especially important when the original text is ironic or carries some other non-obvious meaning. For example, the original passage below presents a quotation from Shakespeare's great villain, Iago, without doing anything to note its irony:

The revision does a much better job of helping the reader make sense of the quotation, its place in Shakespeare's play, and its function in the essay's argument.

Integrating quotations

Quotations need to be worked into texts, but some efforts to do this actually stop essays dead in their tracks. Here a student thinks she must officially begin the quotation with a clause like He states:

Cutting He states allows a stronger, livelier bridge to the quotation.

In similar fashion, students often feel they must announce that a quotation or paraphrase serves as an example. But such careful announcements (along the lines of you've just read an example of what I'm talking about) can drag an essay down:

The revision sweeps the original's slow phrasing (This is one example of how) into one word, Here. And notice that in the revision the writer came up with a sharper verb and tighter phrasing.

As you think about integrating quotations, keep looking for ways to be more concise and lively:

Make sure your quotations fit grammatically into the essay. They can't simply be stuck in anywhere. Like any other elements of writing, quotations must be presented so as to make grammatical sense. Thus a quotations that's an independent clause must not be spliced onto another independent clause:

In general, introduce a quotation with a colon if the quotation consists of one or more complete sentences and the introductory sentence also stands as a complete sentence.

If the quotation is not a complete sentence, then you need to weave it into your own sentence as you would any other word, phrase, or clause:

Let's look more closely at how to introduce quotations.

Signal phrases and statements

Signal phrases and statements let you introduce quotations with a minimum of fuss but enough information to help the reader make sense of them. Often you'll want to specify the author and text; other times you'll want to provide some other background or context-setting information. No universal rule applies, except to ask yourself what your reader needs to know to understand a quotation and its connection to your argument.

Students often use weak or vague signal phrases:

The original opens with an unhelpful sentence that specifies a topic but not an argument. It follows with the choppy, rhythmless "She says" to introduce the quotation. The revision presents Rubin's argument in a nutshell, and the "even" explicitly ties the sentence back to an ongoing discussion, helping the reader keep the flow in mind. The revision also eschews "She says" in favor of an economical colon that moves speedily to the quotation.

One common way to build signal phrases is with the According to x construction:

Another technique, and one in keeping with the Nuts and Bolts preference for action-oriented writing, is to use clauses with the cited scholar as subject and a signaling verb to orient the quotation. Indeed, signal phrases (or clauses) are a great place to get strong verbs into academic writing. Here are some variations on the basic signal phrase construction of author + verb (+ that):

Depending on what you want your reader to know, you can provide all sorts of explanatory material in a signal phrase. Here, for instance, a writer identifies his sources' scholarly expertise in order to make the citation more persuasive:

Whether or not you need such explanations depends on your audience; in this case Fukuyama was writing for a general audience that would not be expected to be familiar with the names of the cited scholars.

One more comment about integrating quotations into an essay: pay attention to rhythm. Here's an in instance in which the writer elegantly integrates a quotation into her own prose. See if you can figure out what she did:

First, the writer breaks up the quotation with that inserted signal phrase Calvino said. That separates Calvino's subject, folktales, from the predicate, are real. The effect is to solemnize Calvino's judgment, giving it the rhetorical oomph of truth (this is a highly effective writer's trick). Second, the writer uses the quotation's shortness and simplicity as a springboard to her own more complex sentences and diction. This balancing of long against short, complex against simple, detail against general, is something good writers do all the time—even with the quotations woven into their texts.

Set-off quotations

In all citation styles, when you wish to include long quotations (more than four lines), you should do so in set-off block format. Left-indent the set-off quotation an appropriate amount (often a half-inch) and prepare for it with a signal statement ending in a colon:

Note that a good signal statement often gives a quick summary of the quotation.

Set-off quotations do's and don'ts:

• Use a complete statement, not a fragment, to signal the quotation.
• Punctuate the signal statement with a colon.
• Indent on the left (from a quarter-inch to an inch, depending on format and teacher requirements).
• Don't put quotation marks around the set-off quotation.
• Put a space after the quotation's terminal punctuation and then supply the parenthetical reference (see the examples above; note that this differs from punctuating short quotations).

Emphasis in a quotation

When readers see emphasis in a quotation, they don't know whether it was already there or was added by the quoter. Here's how to handle these cases:

Ellipsis

Ellipsis is a fancy word meaning leaving out some of the words in a quotation. Students are reluctant to do this, and of course you don't want to change the sense of a passage by leaving out crucial words. But as I've suggested already, pruning a quotation is one of the best ways of strengthening a quotation's impact. Be careful, however: you must notify the reader of any changes, and naturally you cannot change the meaning of a passage in any material sense. If you leave out words within a quoted sentence, use ellipsis—three or four dots with spaces between and around them.

3-dot ellipsis

When you cut some of the words at the beginning of or within a quotation (but less than a full sentence), use 3-dot ellipsis.

Note that you put single spaces around the dots. A considerable number of academic readers care about such things, so be warned.

4-dot ellipsis

If the deleted portion of the quotation includes a sentence's terminal punctuation (the punctuation at the end of a sentence), or if you are using the quotation to end a sentence in your essay, then you have to add a fourth dot, representing the period. If you leave out a sentence or more from a quoted passage, you must also use four-dot ellipsis. Make sure that what you do quote consists of grammatically complete sentences before and after the ellipsis:

Citations go at the end of the quotation, of course, and are inserted before the final dot of 4-dot ellipsis (except for set-off quotations—see above). Here are several picky little ways to get ellipsis wrong (things like spaces in the wrong places), and the way to get it right:

Just to complicate things, for set-off quotations the parenthetical is placed after the final dot, the period (see above).

Finally, you don't always need to use ellipsis when you delete words. The reason for ellipsis is to notify your reader that there are words missing from the quotation. If this is already obvious from context, you don't need ellipsis:

Punctuating quotations

Students get confused about punctuating quotations. For in-text quotations, the rules of American usage are fairly simple: commas and periods go inside the quotation marks (by convention rather than for any rational reason), and all other punctuation marks go outside. If, however, these other punctuation marks are part of the original quotation, then you put them inside the quotation marks.

If, as is usually the case, a parenthetical citation follows the quotation, it generally goes inside the terminal punctuation. Here's an original passage and various possibilities in quoting from it:

Various quoted versions showing different punctuation:

Quotations within quotations

Sometimes you will quote a passage that itself contains quotation marks.

How you handle this depends on whether the main quotation is long enough to be set off or not. If it is a short passage that you are incorporating into your text, then, then you will surround the main quotation with double quotation marks and mark the inner quotation with single quotation marks:

If it's a set-off quotation, then put the usual double-quotation marks around the inner quotation (since quotation marks aren't put around set-off quotations).

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