Using Direct Quotes

Introduction

Once you have a collection of credible sources, your next step is to build that report around those sources, using them as anchors of evidence around your own arguments. If you began with a hypothesis and you’re using the sources as evidence to support it, or if you realize that your hypothesis is wrong because all the credible sources you’ve found poked holes in it, you should at this point be able to draft a thesis—your whole point in a nutshell.

You essentially have four ways of using source material available to you, three of them involving text, and one media:

• Quoting text: copying the source’s exact words and marking them off with quotation marks
• Paraphrasing text: representing the source’s ideas in your own words (without quotation marks)
• Summarizing text: representing the source’s main ideas in your own words (without quotation marks)
• Reproducing media: embedding pictures, videos, audio, graphic elements, etc. into your document

Direct Quotes

Quoting is the easiest way to use sources in a research document, but it also requires care in using it properly so that you don’t accidentally plagiarize, misquote, or overquote. At its simplest, quoting takes source text exactly as it is and puts quotation marks (“ ”) around that text to set it off from your own words. The following points represent conventions and best practices when quoting:

Use double quotation marks

In North America, we set off quoted words from our own words with double quotation marks (“ ”). Opening quotation marks look a little like a tiny superscript “66” and the closing marks like “99.” For a pneumonic device, you might want to think of a quotation as a hockey legend play with Mario Lemieux (jersey number 66) setting up Wayne Gretzky (99) for the goal.

Also use double quotation marks for putting a single word or two in “scare quotes” when you’re drawing attention to how people use certain words and phrases—again, not single quotation marks since there is no such thing as quotation marks “lite.”

Single quotation marks

Use single quotation marks only for reported speech when you have a quotation within a quotation, as in, “The minister responded to say, ‘No comment at this time’ regarding the allegations of wrongdoing.”

If no parenthetical citation follows immediately after the closing quotation marks, the sentence-ending period falls to the left of those closing quotation marks (between the final letter and the “99”); a common mistake is to place the period to the right of the closing quotation marks ( . . . wrongdoing”.).

Signal Phrase

Frame a quotation with a “signal phrase” that identifies the source author or speaker by name and/or role along with a verb relating how the quotation was delivered. The signal phrase can precede, follow, or even split the quotation, and you can choose from a variety of available signal phrase expressions suitable for your purposes (Hacker, 2006, p. 603):

• According to researchers Tblisky and Darion (2003), “. . .”
• As Vice President of Operations Rhonda Rendell has noted, “. . .”
• John Rucker, the first responder who pulled Mr. Warren from the wreckage, said that “. . .”
• Spokespersons Gloria and Tom Grady clarified the new regulations: “. . .”
• “. . . ,” confirmed the minister responsible for the initiative.
• “. . . ,” writes Eva Hess, “. . .”

Quoting purposefully

Quote only when the original wording is important. When we quote famous thinkers like Albert Einstein or Marshall McLuhan, we use their exact words because no one could say it better or more interestingly than they did. Also quote when you want your audience to see wording exactly as it appeared in the source text or as it was said in speech so that they can be sure that you’re not distorting the words as you might if you paraphrased instead. But if there’s nothing special about the original wording, then you’re better to paraphrase properly (see §3.4.2 below) than to quote.

Block-quote sparingly if at all

In rare circumstances, you may want to quote a few sentences or even a paragraph at length if it’s important to represent every single word. If so, the convention is to tab the passage in on both the left and right, not use quotation marks at all, set up the quotation with a signal phrase or sentence ending with a colon, and place the in-text citation following the final period of the block quotation. Consider the following example:

Students frequently overuse direct quotation [when] taking notes, and as a result they overuse quotations in the final [research] paper. Probably only about 10% of your final manuscript should appear as directly quoted matter. Therefore, you should strive to limit the amount of exact transcribing of source materials while taking notes. (Lester, 1976, pp. 46-47)

Don’t overquote

As the above source says, a good rule of thumb is that your completed document should contain no more than 10% quoted material. Much above that will look lazy because it appears that you’re getting quotation to write your document for you. Quote no more than a sentence or two at a time if you quote at all.

Quote accurately

Don’t misquote by editing the source text on purpose or fouling up a transcription accidentally. Quotation requires the exact transcription of the source text, which means writing the same words in the same order in your document as you found them in the original.

To avoid introducing spelling mistakes or other transcription errors, best practice (if your source is electronic) is to highlight the text you want to quote, copy it (ctrl. + c), and paste it (ctrl. + v) into your document so that it matches the formatting of the rest of your document (i.e., with the same font type, size, etc.). To match the formatting, use the Paste Options drop-down menu that appears beside pasted text as soon as you drop it in and disappears as soon as you perform any operation other than clicking on the drop-down menu.

Use brackets and ellipses to indicate edits to quotations

If you need to edit a quotation to be grammatically consistent with your own sentences framing the quotation (e.g., so that the tense is consistently past-tense if it is present-tense in the source text), add clarifying words, or delete words, do so using brackets for changed words and ellipses for deleted words as you can see in the Lester block quotation above.

Though many people mistakenly refer to parentheses ( ) as “brackets”, brackets are squared [ ] and are used mainly to indicate changes to quoted words, whereas parentheses follow the quotation and mark off the citation. If you were to clarify and streamline the final sentence of the block quotation a few points above, for instance, you could say something like: Lester (1976) recommended “limit[ing] the amount of exact transcribing . . . while taking notes” (p. 47). Here, the verb “limit” in the source text needs to be converted into its participle form (having an -ing ending) to follow the past-tense verb in the sentence framing the quotation grammatically. Sneakily adding the “ing” to “limit” without using brackets would be misquotation because “limiting” appears nowhere in the original.

Notice that the ellipsis above is three spaced periods (not three stuck together, as in “…”) and that one doesn’t appear at the beginning of the quotation to represent the words in the original prior to “limit” nor at the end to represent source text following the quoted words (“… limit …”). Use the ellipsis only to show that you’re skipping over unnecessary words within a quotation.

Be careful not to use brackets and ellipses in a way that distorts or obscures the meaning of the original text.

For instance, omitting “Probably” and changing “should” to “[can]” in the Lester quotation above will turn his soft guideline into a hard rule, which are not the same.

If the quotation includes writing errors such as spelling mistakes, show that they’re the author’s (rather than yours) by adding “[sic]” immediately after each error (“sic” abbreviates sic erat scriptum, Latin for “thus it had been written”), as in:

When you said in the class discussion forum, “No one cares about grammer, [sic] it doesnt [sic] really matter,” you tend to undermine your credibility on the topic with poor spelling and a comma splice.

Capitalize as in the original, even if it seems strange to start a quotation with a capital (because it was the first word in the original) though it’s no longer the first word because it follows a signal phrase in your sentence. See the example in the point above, for instance.

Quotation is a powerful tool in the arsenal of any writer needing to support a point with evidence. Capturing the source’s words exactly as they were written or spoken is an honest way of presenting research.

Summary

While direct quotes are excellent tools to support a claim you are making, they should be used sparingly. Block quotes should be used seldom and should not take up more than a small percentage of your essay.

While using direct quotes, you will want to keep the following in mind:

• Quote purposefully – include quotes only when exact wording is necessary
• Incorporate signal phrases – signal phrase can precede, follow, or even split the quotation
• Do not overquote – aim for no more than 10% of your paper to be quotations
• APA – remember to review all quotations for the proper use of brackets, quotation marks, and source information

Sources:

“Using Source Text: Quoting, Paraphrasing, and Summarizing.” By Jordan Smith. Retrieved from: https://ecampusontario.pressbooks.pub/communicationatwork/chapter/3-4-using-source-text-quoting-paraphrasing-and-summarizing/ Licensed under: CC-BY. Adapted by The American Women’s College.