Quotes and Quoting
A few slick rules to keep in mind to make your papers reflect your careful attention to detail: book titles, movie titles, newspaper names, and names of magazines and journals are EITHER italicized or underlined (but NOT both). Names of articles (whether in magazines, newspapers, or journals) are put “in quotation marks”, as are names of essays taken from books that are collections of essays (like “L.A. as Design Product: How Art Works in a Regional Economy” in Scott and Soja’s The City).
Use quotations:
* To focus on a particularly well-stated key idea in a source.
* To show what others – ideally, experts, but sometimes people involved with the subject or the general public – think about a subject.
* To add interest, power, or character to your argument.
* To show a range of opinion.
* To clarify a difficult or contested point.
* To demonstrate the complexity of an issue.
If you don’t have a reason that you can identify to use a quote, then it is frighteningly likely that your reader will sense this. The reader will then assume that you are only using quoted material as “filler”; in other words, the reader will think that you can’t fill the length requirement for the paper and are simply using quotes to make up for your own deficiencies. If your reader is also assigning a grade to your paper, this presents a problem for you, so always know the reason that you select a quote.
Tags
NEVER let a quote simply speak for itself. The reason that most instructors require you to use quoted material in your papers is so that you can show your mastery of understanding written material. Therefore, if you simply have a quote without an attributive tag, your instructor may not be able to tell that you understand the source that you have used. For example,
“The cultural bent of L.A.’s immigrants and sojourners – of whatever language, skin color, or demeanor – shapes economy and culture.”
doesn’t show your reader what’s important about this quote, nor does it let the reader know who said this. But if you use an attributive tag, and parenthetical documentation, you can rectify these problems:
Molotch explains that “[t]he cultural bent of L.A.’s immigrants and sojourners – of whatever language, skin color, or demeanor – shapes economy and culture” (Molotch 232), powerfully reinforcing the inseparability of art and finance.
The more specific your tag, the better you can convey your intended meaning. Remember, you can use brackets (as in the above quote showing that you’ve changed a lowercase letter to a capital) to help weave the quote into the grammar of your sentence. Here’s a list of helpful verbs of attribution:
* accept
* add
* admit
* affirm
* allege
* argue
* believe
* claim
* confirm
* contend
* declare
* deny
* disagree
* emphasize
* insist
* mention
* posit
* propose
* reveal
* say
* state
* think
* verify
Keep in mind that, as these words have distinct meanings, you need to be aware of the meaning of the word that you choose – so if you don’t know what a word means, look it up in the dictionary before you use it.
Links
Ms. Strong's Home Page
Writing 140 Home Page
Assignment 2
Assignment 3
