How to Quote Essay

Guidelines for Integrating Quotations

1. Do not merely drop a quotation into your work without properly introducing it or integrating it fully into your sentence. You have three options:

Introduce the quotation with a statement that puts it in context. A colon follows a formal statement or independent clause.

Example

Lynn Quitman Troyka warns us of the particular challenges of using quotations in research papers: “The greatest risk you take when you use quotations is that you will end up with choppy, incoherent sentences” (184).

Use a signal phrase followed by a comma or a signal verb followed by that to announce a quotation.

Example

According to Lynn Quitman Troyka,
The narrator tells us that “Lucille was out of her mind” (34).
As Jake Barnes says,
Frye rejects this notion when he argues,

Integrate the quotation fully into your sentence. The quotation and your words must add up to a complete sentence.

Example

We know the boy has learned a painful lesson when he says that his eyes “burned with anguish and anger” (Joyce 481).

2. Insert a parenthetical reference (abbreviated information about the source in brackets) after the quotation. (See the examples above.)

After you close the quotation, give the page number in brackets, and then add the comma, period, semi-colon, colon or dash. Place a question mark or exclamation point inside the final quotation mark if it is part of the quotation, outside the closing parenthesis if it is your own.

If the author’s name is not mentioned in the signal phrase preceding the quotation, then place the author’s last name and the page number, with no punctuation between them, in the brackets. However, if the author’s name is noted in the signal phrase, or if you are writing an essay on only one primary source (e.g. one short story), and the author is given, then you may omit the author’s name from the parenthetical reference.

3. Indent longer quotations (more than four lines) ten spaces from the margin. Notice that quotation marks are not used to enclose material that is set off from the text and that the parenthetical reference is placed after the punctuation following the quotation.

Example

The boy reveals his romantic nature as he describes his fascination with Mangan’s sister and the world of Araby:

What innumerable follies laid waste my waking and sleeping thoughts after that evening! I wished to annihilate the tedious intervening days. I chafed against the work of school. At night in my bedroom and by day in the classroom her image came between me and the

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