WHEN
TO QUOTE
Perhaps the number one point to make regarding quoting is this: Don’t
overdo it. Your paper should not
be a long string of quotations from various sources.
Most of your paper should be your own words, your own organization,
your own analysis. Of course, you
will be obtaining your facts and many of your ideas from the sources you
consult. But the resulting paper
should be your own creation. Pick
up any book at glance at its pages. You
will see that only a small percentage of the text on any page consists of
phrases or sentences that are quotations from other sources.
Another important rule to remember is this: Quote only when the words of
your source are extremely important or colorful, such that you need to give
them verbatim to your reader. Don’t
quote ordinary sentences. You
should know the topic well enough when you start to write that you don’t
need to be looking through your research materials constantly to find passages
to insert in your paper.
Take the following example. A
student is writing a paper on the first weeks of Abraham Lincoln’s presidency.
The student reads the following sentence in a biography of Lincoln:
“When Lincoln took the oath of office he knew already that a large number of
difficult problems would face him.” That
is an ordinary sentence, and you should know the material well enough that you
could say something like that in your own words.
If the exact words are important enough to quote, keep two other
thoughts in mind. Quote only those
words that are crucial to your message. In
other words, don’t quote an entire passage if all that you need is one
sentence or part of a sentence. Also,
be sure to introduce your quotations. Don’t just put a quoted sentence in the middle of one of
your paragraphs without telling the reader who said it.
Thus you should preface your quotations with things like the following:
Article 39 of section two of the federal regulatory statute stipulates
that “.......
In his biography of Hitler, Joseph Wilson argues, “......
In 1993 Robert Dole claimed that “.....
See the following
for more discussion of effective quoting:
The Nuts and
Bolts of College Writing .
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top of writing guide.