The Nuts and Bolts of College Writing: Quotations
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| The Nuts and Bolts of College Writing: Quotations
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 a  nd 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.
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).
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 s  ome 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 speed bumps. 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 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.
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.
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. |
Quotations and proof