Integration Of Quotations: Poetry

V. Piercy

The Operation Was a Success: Integration of Quotations from Short Stories

The ability to smoothly integrate quotations is a sign of writing skill and sophistication in the same way that grace is a sign of an accomplished athlete. Taking someone else’s words out of their context and placing this passage (with its foreign style and strange vocabulary) into your essay (with its own context, style, and vocabulary) requires the same concerns of a surgeon transplanting a heart. You need to link up this “foreign body” or quotation to the surrounding elements. Without the techniques listed below, your essay will be in the same state as a patient experiencing internal bleeding and tissue rejection.

Below are ways to integrate quotations. However, one guideline to start with is that you should never start a paragraph with a quotation. Quotations are for support and thus should appear within the paragraph. A topic sentence in your own words should begin each body paragraph, and the analysis of all of the lines in that paragraph should relate to that topic sentence.

Ways of integrating quotations

1. Quote just a phrase or part of the sentence:

The mother clearly disapproves of Dee and her definition of heritage; for example the mother attributes to Dee a “scalding humor that erupted like bubbles in lye,” and she compares Maggie’s reaction to Dee to “when you see the wriggling end of a snake” (Walker 320).

2. Use a speech tag (followed by a comma):

A sign that Dee has adopted a distant African culture is how she has allowed her hair to grow into what was called an Afro in the 1960s. The narrator says, “[Dee’s hair] stands straight up like the wool on a sheep. It is black as night and around the edges are two long pigtails that rope about like small lizards disappearing behind her ears” (Walker 321).

3. Provide a lead-in sentence (followed by a colon):

The narrator demonstrates how she values the family’s immediate heritage and not some unknown heritage from Africa when she thinks of the history of Dee’s name: “[I]n fact, I probably could have carried [the history of Dee’s name] beyond the Civil War through the branches” (Walker 321).

Note the use of brackets to indicate letters and words that have been added to a quotation to clarify the passage or to make it grammatically correct. Also, if you delete words from the middle or end (not the beginning) of a quotation, use an ellipsis mark, which consists of three periods inside square brackets: [. . . ]

Presenting quotations (Manuscript Form)

Quoting dialogue and description together: If you are quoting dialogue and description together, you must put the whole passage within double quotation marks and the dialogue within single quotation marks:

Dee’s distance from her family heritage is clear in how she chooses to display rather than use the family heirlooms: “‘I can use the churn as a centerpiece for the alcove table,’ she said, sliding a plate over the churn, ‘and I’ll think of something artistic to do with the dasher’” (Walker 323).

Quoting four or more lines: If you must quote a long (more than four lines) passage, introduce the lines with a complete sentence followed by a colon. Then follow the guidelines for presenting a long quotations. Also, do not end a paragraph with a long quotation; always comment on what you’ve quoted:

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Even before Dee arrives, the mother describes how she resents how Dee tries to impose other

people’s lifestyles and customs upon herself and Maggie:

[Dee] used to read to us without pity; forcing words, lies, other folks’ habits, whole lives

upon us two, sitting trapped and ignorant underneath her voice. She washed us in a

river of make-believe, burned us with a lot of knowledge that we didn’t necessarily need

to know. Pressed us to her with the serious way she read, to shove us away at just the

moment, like dimwits, we seemed about to understand. (Walker 319)

The narrator must consider Dee’s superficial adoption of African language and dress as similar to

something that is “make-believe” and “lies,” something that “burned.”

If the passage you’re quoting spans more than one paragraph, indent each new paragraph an additional three spaces:

“No, Mama,” she says. “Not ‘Dee,’ Wangero Leewanika Kemanjo!”

“What happened to ‘Dee’?” I wanted to know.

“She’s dead,” Wangero said. “I couldn’t bear it any longer, being named after the

people who oppress me.” (Walker 321)

Notes about parenthetical documentation 1. Note that the parenthetical documentation appears at the end of the sentence in which the quotation appears. 2. Note that a space appears before the parenthetical documentation and that the punctuation appears after the parenthetical documentation (except with long quotations). 3. When quoting from different pages in different places in the same sentence, put a comma and space between the numbers. For example, if you quote a phrase from page 318 in one part of the sentence and from page 325 in another part of the sentence, the parenthetical documentation should appear like this: (Walker 318, 325). 4. When quoting a passage that spans more than one page, the parenthetical documentation should appear thus: (Walker 318-19).

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