Quotations

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Anything You Want to Talk About?

(No.)

Quotations

Based on chapter 3 of They Say, I Say.

Key Points

When to use quotations

• Use when they state a point in exactly the right words
• If you’re arguing about the words that someone said
• For accuracy
• To enliven writing

When not to use quotations

• Gratuitously, out of place or unnecessary

Notice that different writers differ on how liberally to use quotations. I tend to use them only for the first two reasons listed above, but They Say, I Say supports using them more often. There’s no “right” answer to this, as long as you don’t go wildly to either extreme.

How to integrate quotations into your own argument

• Frame every quotation with introductory context and following explanation, say why it helps your argument. Don’t just write lists of quotations.

Practice

Return to the “Memes” blog post from Wednesday (https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/history-making-and-remembering-a-case-for-critical-media-literacy/; Alhassen and Ali, “By Any Memes Necessary: A Case for Critical Media Literacy,” Los Angeles Review of Books, May 19, 2021). Decide whether you mostly agree, or mostly disagree, with the authors’ view that today’s social media are becoming an archive of false knowledge for future scholars. Pick a phrase or passage from the essay that you could use to support an argument for that agreement or disagreement, and write it as a quotation, with suitable framing, in a Google document

Discussion

Interpretations of quotations can get long. That’s OK, it’s more important to fully explain how you interpret a quotation than to be brief. In extreme cases it might even be necessary to write an “interpretive” piece of framing that’s really just a transition to a following paragraph of interpretation.

But if a long interpretation is needed because you have a long quotation, consider breaking the quotation up into several shorter ones, each with its own (presumably shorter) framing.

Ellipsis (“...”) is a useful signal that you have left something out of a quotation. Presumably because you didn’t consider it important to the point you make with the quotation, but it’s still important to let readers know that the words you quote aren’t exactly what the original author said. Readers who want to can go check the quotation and decide for themselves if the missing words change its interpretation.

Next

Crediting sources and plagiarism.

Please read “Defining Plagiarism” and “Avoiding Plagiarism” in the “Research” module of “Conventions of College Writing.”

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