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Chapter 13

Integrating Quotations

Jason Sheley

In most non-fiction writing, we often need to make use of the words of other writers for our purposes. However, this is always a tricky business. Questions arise such as, How much of another writer's work should I incorporate? How do I know if I have incorporated enough? Too much? Not enough? In this chapter, I want to explore these issues and help you make these decisions in your own writing.

Before we begin, I want to say briefly what this guide will not be about. I will not include here any specific instructions on the mechanics of making quotations in your work. For that guidance, you should consult Andrea Lundsford's Easy Writer. If you are using the third edition, you can find information on quotations at pp. 117-121. If you are using the fourth edition, you can find the relevant information on pp. 121-125.

The first thing to notice about using quotations is that the decision to incorporate quotations in your paper is a choice. This choice depends crucially on your purposes as a writer, as well as the effect you want your selection to have on the reader. The first reason to incorporate quotations into your essay depends on the logic of your argument. You are already familiar with the basic categories of Claims, Evidence and Warrants. Here we want to use quotations in such a way that they help us achieve our logical aims. For a moment, consider some of the work that you have written before. When you have used quotations, why did you incorporate them? What purpose did they serve? For example, were you writing an argumentative essay in which you needed to provide evidence?

When using quotations, in addition to why and when one should use them, we need to discuss "how" and the standard stylistic conventions that govern their use in academic writing. Let's start with a few basic guidelines, and then we will consider more specific cases below. To sum up, the following 3 rules should guide you in using quotations:

1) Quote only what is necessary for your purposes.

2) Make the quotation fit your own prose as much as possible.

3) When quoting, follow accepted conventions.

What follows are some more detailed conventions for specific writing situations.

Direct Quotations

Quoting key terms and short phrases Sometimes quoting only what is necessary for our purposes means that we quote only a short phrase, or only a few words. Can you think of a reason why you would single out a short passage in this way? In the following excerpt, notice how Professor David Pan weaves the language of Jacques Derrida into his analysis of Walter Benjamin. Can you identify the short selected quote?

The assumption behind this goal of breaking the historical continuum through a moment of transcendence is that this continuum extends a rule of power that undermines the existing law’s claim to manifest a higher principle. As both Jacques Derrida (1017) and Jan-Werner Müller have documented (469), Benjamin grounds this assumption in Zur Kritik der Gewalt with the idea that the origins of law lie in violence. The link between law and violence is for him more than just a coincidence of violence with justice in a way that would emphasize their complementary relationship, as when Derrida, explicating Pascal, suggests that “justice demands, as justice, recourse to force” (937).

In this case, Professor Pan has chosen just enough of the selected passages for his purposes. Why does Professor Pan choose to integrate the primary text in this way? In some cases, you might need to use a single word or phrase to provide evidence for our claims. In this instance, quoting from the original source shows how the specific words used by the author convey a meaning that Professor Pan could not get across to the reader in any other way.

Quoting Whole Sentences

In some instances, for some evidence it is important to quote more than a word or phrase, you may wish to include a whole sentence of someone else's work. In the following example, notice how Professor Pan weaves the sentence from Giorgio Agamben into his paragraph. In this case, Professor Pan has chosen just enough of the selected passages for his purposes:

In taking over the concept of bare life from Benjamin, he levels the distinction between bare life and sacred life that would provide the possibility of recog nizing a symbolic and spiritual aspect of human life. In a move that William Connolly has criticized for unduly limiting our notion of the sacred (28–29), Agamben equates bare life with sacred life: “The life caught in the sovereign ban is the life that is originarily sacred— that is, that may be killed but not sac- rificed— and, in this sense, the production of bare life is the originary activity of sovereignty” (Homo Sacer 83).

Can you think of a good reason why Professor Pan did not include the entire passage, and instead included only the sentence? What would happen if he had incorporated a larger block of text? On the other hand, would it change things if he merely paraphrased the sentence? An important warning is in order here. Students often have trouble with quoting too much of a selected text, rather than too little. As such, it's important to remember to select the parts of a text that are the most important for your aims. In the passage above, Professor Pan could have selected an entire paragraph from which the sentence was selected. Instead, he chose a sentence that represents a succinct summary of Agamben's position.

Quoting Verse

When quoting from a work of poetry, drama or epic, we need a method for making clear to the reader how the text is structured. Notice how Professor Pan incorporates the following passages from Bertolt Brecht into his paragraph:

As Mueller has described (105–06), Brecht’s play also tries to present this individual conflict in such a way as to deemphasize the role of any single individual and conceive the flight as a collective achievement. The title and the text designate the pilot of the plane not as “Lindbergh” but as the plural “Lindberghs” and motivate the choice by emphasizing at one point the collective effort of the airplane workers who built Lindbergh’s machine: “They worked, I / continue to work, I am not alone, we are / Eight, who are flying here” (Der Flug der Lindberghs 6).3 Although this passage attempts to merge the efforts of the aircraft workers with those of the pilot into a collective activity through the use of rhetorical devices, this rhetoric cannot change the fact that Lindbergh’s situation is a profoundly individual one.The key difference between pilot and workers becomes apparent in another passage that again tries to rhetorically merge the pilot with the workers. While facing sleep deprivation, “Lindberghs” state: “Often 24 hours without rest / my comrades in San Diego / built this machine. May I / Not be worse than they. I / must not sleep“ (Der Flug der Lindberghs 9).4

Notice also that in this case, Professor Pan incorporates two different passages from Brecht in order to make a broader comparison. This is sometimes a good method for making a point, especially when your excerpt is meant to facilitate your close reading of a text.

Quoting Large Segments or Blocks of Text vs. Paraphrase vs. Summary

Sometimes it is necessary to quote from a much larger passage of text in order to provide evidence for your argument. You might do this because the reader is unfamiliar with the text you are using. Or you might do so because you are doing an extensive analysis of a particular passage. This can be especially helpful if you wish to direct your reader's attention to the specific language that is used throughout the selected text. Again, sometimes you might need to provide a larger quote because the sentence you wish to discuss falls within a larger context, and the reader needs to understand this context in order to make sense of your argument. In this case, quoting can sometimes be tricky, and it can often be difficult to tell whether he have enough material, too little, or too much. Again, remember only to include just what you need.

Let's consider a passage from the Epictetus' Encheiridion. If we chose to incorporate the whole passage as a block quote, we would set it apart like this:

What upsets people is not things themselves but their judgments about things. For example, death is nothing dreadful (or else it would have appeared dreadful to Socrates), but instead the judgment about death that it is dreadful -- that is what is dreadful. So when we are thwarted or upset or distressed, let us never blame someone else but ourselves, that is, our own judgments. An uneducated person accuses others when he is doing badly; a partly educated person accuses himself, an educated person accuses neither someone else nor himself.

The choice to use a large block of text rather than a paraphrase is often a difficult one. Think about this for a moment. Why would you choose to use the large quotation? Under what circumstances would it be better to use a paraphrase? Let's look at this a little more closely, and see how we might convert our selected passage into a paraphrase, as well as a summary.

Indirect Quotations

Sometimes, we would like to incorporate ideas from a work, but we would like the ideas to more closely match our own way of writing. We might do this because a section of our essay has a particular "flow," and we would like to avoid interrupting that flow as much as possible. Or, in other words, there might be cases in which we find that using the whole block quote would make our essay feel too "clunky" or awkward.

There are two basic ways to incorporate ideas in indirect quotations: paraphrase and summary. Paraphrase is used when we would like to restate the meaning of a passage in our own words. This can often be helpful if the exact phrasing of the passage is not part of our analysis — for example, if we wish to focus our analysis on the logos of a passage, but put the pathos in the background. On the other hand, summary is used when we condense the ideas in the passage into the shortest form in order to capture only the most essential details. We might do this if we wish to shift the reader's focus to the main idea of a passage, while putting the details of the argument and word choice of a passage in the background. Compare the following ways of incorporating a passage from Epictetus' Encheiridion. Consider again the long quotation from the work itself:

Here is the same passage written as a paraphrase:

Epictetus says that some people are upset because they mistakenly make judgments about events, and say that the events themselves are bad. In order to support this idea, Epictetus appeals to the example how death is sometimes considered to be a dreadful thing by many people. Yet the true Stoic will see that death should be regarded as nothing to us, and if there is a fault to be found, it is not to be found in the world, but rather with our mistaken judgments. Indeed, the Stoic sage will take this idea one step further in relation to the initiate and to the trainee: The common person blames the thing. The initiate blames himself. The sage blames neither the thing nor himself.

And, finally, here is the same passage written as a summary:

According to Epictetus, the Stoic sage will adjust his beliefs so that he blames neither things for the dread they cause, nor will he blame himself. Rather, he will learn to adjust his own judgments so that what appears dreadful to the many does not appear dreadful to him. And if he makes a mistake, he will learn to correct it and not place the blame upon himself.

Final thoughts and exercises To practice using quotations, you can try taking some of the quotes that I have provided in this guide, and rearrange them into paragraphs of your own. Try setting off part of the paragraph as a block quote, for example. If I have provided a block quote, try incorporating part of it into a quotation of a few words, or a sentence. Second, for each of the paragraphs I have quoted from, ask yourself how the quoted material helps the argument that the writer is trying to make. If the material is a sentence or a few words, how does this help the writer provide evidence for his claims? Notice also that in each case, the writer does not merely insert the quote and leave it at that. He also provides a warrant for the use of evidence, and often background material. At the very least he introduces the quotation in some way.