Using Quotations in an Essay

Using Quotations in an Essay


In your body paragraphs, you will need to provide support for the points you are making.  In some types of essays, such as explorations of social issues, this support might take the form of citing statistics or providing personal stories about the effects of that issue.  If discussing health insurance in America, for instance, you could cite the numbers of people who lose their coverage when they fall ill or recount one person’s experience of losing insurance.

In an essay in which you analyze a literary work, however, most of your support will take the form of quotations.  You will need to quote directly from the work you are analyzing.  These quotations will show readers the ways in which a writer expresses his or her ideas and will allow you to explain the significance of the quotations to your own interpretations of the work.

As a rule of thumb, you need at least one and preferable more than one quotation per body paragraph.  Also, at times you may quote just a few words or substantial passages in order to provide adequate support.

Just remember that you must quote from the text in every body paragraph (though not necessarily the introductory or concluding paragraphs).  Otherwise, you will not have provided any evidence for your interpretations of the work.


When to Quote

In literary analysis essays, quotations usually come three or four sentences into a paragraph.  Most avoid opening paragraphs with quotations.  Instead, they open with a transitional sentence or a Topic Sentence.  Then they comment on the point they will address in the essay or provide some background summary.  Then, when they wish to provide support for their point, they introduce the quotation and then quote.  After quoting, they explain how the quotation helps to support their point in the paragraph and their overall Thesis for the essay.

Therefore, the following pattern usually proves most useful:
Establish your point in the paragraph
Give background/summary information
Introduce your quotation
Quote
Analyze your quotation

Most then repeat this pattern once or twice more in the body paragraph in order to thoroughly explore their point.  As an example of this pattern, let’s return to the sample body paragraph from the earlier lecture:

            Another of Willy’s character defects is his unwillingness to accept responsibility for the impact his own actions have had on Biff.  For instance, the discovery of Willy’s affair in Boston clearly devastated Biff, but Willy does not know the extent of this devastation until he sees Bernard in Charley’s office years later.  Willy asks Bernard if it is his own fault that Biff has been a failure, and Bernard answers that he does not know.  He does, however, recount his experience with Biff after Biff’s return from Boston.  He tells Willy that he found Biff burning his tennis shoes with the “University of Virginia” written on them and then “We had a fist fight.  It lasted at least half and hour.  Just the two of us, punching each other down the cellar, and crying right through it.  I’ve often thought of how strange it was that I knew he’d given up his life” (1839-40).  In this moment, Willy learns that Biff had surrendered his dreams and his future because of what he saw in Boston.  In fact, Biff was so grief-stricken that he literally burned his hopes, which the shoes represent, and fought his only friend.  Bernard’s answer to Willy’s questions about Biff could lead Willy to accept his role in Biff’s failures, but he continues to reject any responsibility for his actions.  When Willy hears Bernard’s story, he becomes defensive and declares, “What are you trying to do, blame it on me?  If a boy lays down is that my fault?” (1840).  Thus, instead of being honest with himself he continues his attempt to maintain his fantasy world in which he is blameless for his family’s miseries.  As a result, he continues to refuse to “grow up,” as Charley tells him before Biff’s final high school football game (1837), and he also does not see that he was largely responsible for Biff “growing up” into a disillusioned, bitter man who rejected himself in order to reject his father’s image of him.

This paragraph uses three passages from the play.  It first quotes Bernard’s four-sentence description of his experience with Biff, then Willy’s two-sentence response, then a two-word description from Charley.  Each of the quotations is properly introduced and then explained.  They all relate directly to the central point in the paragraph, as well.  As a result, this writer has used quotations effectively in the paragraph.


Block Quoting

Keep in mind that sometimes quoting longer passages (five lines or more, after you've typed up the quote) also can work well.  When you do so, however, you need to use the block quotation format.  To block quote, you introduce the quotation, use a colon, and then hit a “hard return/Enter.”  Then you use the “Indent” function (not a Tab) and indent the entire passage one full inch.  You type out the full passage you are quoting, cite it, and hit the “hard return/Enter” again.  This will return you to the original margin, where you will thoroughly analyze the passage you have quoted.  As a rule of thumb, use block quotation for passages more than four lines in length.

Here’s an example (the block quotation is highlighted in blue—Also, I have double-spaced the passage to emphasize that block quotations, like your regular text, is double-spaced, not single-spaced):


At the funeral, the reader might be surprised to find that Charley is Willy’s primary defender.  However, Charley fulfills this role because he understands Willy’s life better than Biff, Happy, or Linda since he too has been a salesman and faced the same hopes and fears as Willy.  He reveals his sympathy for Willy when he stands up to Biff’s questioning of Willy’s life, dreams, and lack of self-knowledge and asserts to them all:
Nobody dast blame this man.  You don’t understand: Willy was a salesman.  And for a salesman, there is no rock bottom to the life.  He don’t put a bolt to a nut, he don’t tell you the law or give you medicine.  He’s a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine.  And when they start not smiling back—that’s an earthquake.  And then you get yourself a couple of spots on your hat, and you’re finished.  Nobody dast blame this man.  A salesman is got to dream, boy.  It comes with the territory. (1862)
Because this speech comes near the end of the play, it holds weight.  It also offers a “requiem” (the title of this section of the play) not only to Willy but to all men like him.  Therefore, both Willy and Charley become the representative salesmen in the play, and their differing responses to this profession reveal .


Block quotations can be very useful, but remember two things about them: never begin or end a paragraph with a block quotation.  You must always introduce a block quotation and then analyze it.

Introducing Quotations

When you quote, always make sure to introduce your quotations.  Do not just “drop” a quotation into a paragraph.  You need a smooth transition into the quotation in order to indicate that you are quoting and why you are quoting.  For instance, you would not do the following:

Willy is a man who is always looking to the past.  “Oh, Ben, that’s good to hear!  Because sometimes I’m afraid that I’m not teaching them the right kind of—Ben, how should I teach them?” (1819).

This use of the quotation does not really work because it is confusing.  And it is confusing because the writer has not properly introduced the quotation, creating a transition between his point and quotation itself.  As a result, we do not know what point he intends to make with the quotation.  The writer may know, but that doesn’t help us at all.  Instead, he should have written something like this:

Willy is a man who is always looking to the past.  Miller shows this tendency quite clearly when he has Willy slip into the past in his own mind.  During one of these episodes, Willy reenacts a meeting with his wealthy brother Ben and reveals his own insecurities by asserting, “Oh, Ben, that’s good to hear!  Because sometimes I’m afraid that I’m not teaching them the right kind of—Ben, how should I teach them?” (1819).

Now we know what the writer intends to show by quoting this passage (that Willy is talking to Ben and revealing his own insecurities).  Hence, the idea is clear.  Introductions to quotations help to establish and maintain clarity.  Do not forget to use them!


Terms to Use When Introducing Quotations

When you introduce a quotation, you are using a signal phrase that “signals” to readers that you are quoting.  One unfortunate habit that afflicts many writers is the tendency to always use the signal phrases “So-and-so says” or “So-and-so states.”  “Says” and “states” generally do not work well as introductions because they are vague.  They do not indicate how someone says or states something, nor are they indicate the intensity with which one says or states something.  Plus, they get very repetitive and boooooring.

Instead, you should try to vary the ways in which you introduce quotations and the words you use to introduce quotations.  Consult the following list as a reference point for words that may apply to the passage you are quoting:

Words that introduce quotes
acknowledges
adds
admits
agrees
argues
asserts
believes
claims
comments
compares
confirms
contends
declares
denies
disputes
emphasizes

endorses
grants
illustrates
implies
insists
notes
observes
points out
reasons
refutes
rejects
reports
responds
suggests
thinks
writes



Quoting Poetry

When it comes time to quote poetry in your final essay, you will need to use a slightly different set of rules than you use when quoting prose.  Obviously, poetry is poetry largely because it is not written in prose form.  Instead, it is written in verse with very specific line breaks.  Poets are very, very particular about where they place their line breaks.  Thus, you also need to indicate these lines breaks when quoting.

When you block quote poetry, showing the line breaks is easy because you quote the passage exactly as it appears in the original poem, even when the poet uses unusual spacing.  For instance, if you were quoting from e. e. cummings’ poem “she being Brand,” it would appear in this strange format:

[. . .] i touched the accelerator and give

her the juice,good

                           (it

was the first ride and believe i we was

happy to see how nice she acted right up to

the last minute [. . .] (760; lines 22-27)


Notice that the line breaks occur where cummings places them and that the funky “(it” goes in the middle of the line where he placed it, not at the beginning of the line.  Also, notice that you cite the line numbers from the poem, not just the page number.  (Note: The brackets with ellipses appear at the beginning and end of this particular passage only because I cut the word “avenue” from the first line and the words “coming back down by the Public” from the last line.  Normally you would not use brackets with ellipses at the beginning or end of a block quotation.)

When quoting these same lines within a paragraph without using a block quote, you will use a slash mark to indicate a line break.  Make sure to put a space before and a space after the slash mark.  Example:

Cummings describes the speaker’s reaction to driving his new “car” with the lines, “i touched the accelerator and give / her the juice,good / (it / was the first ride and believe I we was / happy to see how nice she acted right up to / the last minute [. . .]” (760; lines 22-27).

Remember, do not quote lines from poetry the same way you quote lines from prose.  Different rules apply to different literary genres.


Conclusion

Quotations are an essential element of every essay, and you need to both choose your quotations well and use them properly.  If you do not quote, then you provide no evidence for your arguments.  If you provide no evidence for your arguments, then your readers will not believe what you have to say.  If your readers do not believe what you have to say, then you have failed to write an effective essay.  Therefore, quote and quote well.  And then thoroughly analyze your quotations.

If you have further questions about quoting, please consult your grammar text.  Also, please consult the “Punctuation with Quotations” lecture for information on the varieties of ways you can introduce quotations and the proper punctuation to use when quoting.

A web page on quoting that students have found helpful in the past is Michael Harvey's The Nuts and Bolts of College Writing.  Just click the link for access to the page.  It's quite thorough.