Today in class you will collaborate on an exercise that offers practice in presenting quotations in a way that makes their relevance clear to the reader, first by introducing them with signal phrases and second by following them with an explanation.
As you begin work on your final essay and annotated bibliography next week, continue to look to these templates as models for introducing and explaining quotations from your sources.
Templates for Introducing Quotations
- X states, “____________________________.”
- As the scholar X puts it “____________________________.”
- According to X, “____________________________.”
- X himself writes, “____________________________.”
- In her book, X maintains that “____________________________.”
- Writing in The Wall Street Journal, X complains that “____________________________.”
- In X’s view, “____________________________.”
- X agrees when she writes, “____________________________.”
- X disagrees when he writes, “____________________________.”
- X complicates matters further when she writes, “____________________________.”
Templates for Explaining Quotations
- Basically, X is warning that “____________________________.”
- In other words, X believes “____________________________.”
- In making this comment, X urges us to “____________________________.”
- X himself writes, “____________________________.”
- X’s point is that “____________________________.”
- The essence of X’s argument is that “____________________________.”
Presenting Direct and Indirect Quotations
When you quote a source, look carefully at the text to determine whether the words are the writer’s or those of someone else whom the writer is quoting. The latter is an example of an indirect quotation.
Direct Quotation
According to author Jonathan Kay, “Scrabble treats language the way computers do—as arbitrarily ordered codes stored in a memory chip.”
Direct Quotation Followed by an Indirect Quotation
Educator Maryanne Wolf notes that “the sense of touch in print reading adds an important redundancy to information,” what another researcher has referred to as the “technology of recurrence” (Piper qtd. in Wolf).
In the example above, Piper qtd. in Wolf appears in parentheses to indicate that the words of the second quotation are Piper’s—not Wolf’s own words but rather ones that she quotes in “Skim Reading is the New Normal.”
For more examples of integrating sources into your writing, see Writing Analytically (219-29), the sample MLA-style research paper on OWL, Purdue’s Online Writing Lab, and the sample MLA-Style research papers at the MLA Style Center.
Next Up
Wordplay Day! To up your game and increase your word power, review the tips and tools on the Scrabble website as well as my blog posts devoted to the game.
Jane Lucas 