How to Quote and How to Cite
An
academic research paper is written according to the guidelines of a certain
style manual. In English, that style manual is MLA, which stands for the Modern
Language Association. Other academic majors have styles of their own.
There
are four components to MLA style: (1) document appearance, (2) how to quote,
(3) how to cite, and (4) the Works Cited page. This handout will focus on items
2 and 3.
About Titles
The
standard title for an academic paper is a two-part title:
Creative Part: Straightforward Part
Some
examples:
·
Whiffleballs from
Venus: The Atmosphere of Darkness in Edgar Allan Poe
·
Tending Dreams:
Rabbit Symbolism in Of Mice and Men
In
Titles, all words except conjunctions and shorter prepositions get capitalized.
How to Quote
Quoting should be a natural part of
essay writing. Ideally, you would find some sources for the purpose of further
educating yourself on the subject you plan to write on. You would read those
sources before you begin writing. As you write your essay, you will probably
want to borrow—either directly or indirectly—from your sources. When you do
borrow, you must let the reader know where your borrowed material was borrowed
from.
Key Points
·
Quotations are used to support your ideas, not vice
versa. Your essay will stand or fall
based on the strength of your own ideas in your own writing. An occasional
quotation may be used in support of your ideas. A common mistake among student
writers is to lead with a quotation and then spend time discussing their quotation.
Never do this. Instead, always lead with your own ideas and let any borrowed
material (quotations) bring up the rear. After you drop in a quotation, don’t
refer back to it. Just move on. It is not your job to explain the words in the
quotation; it is the quotation’s job to explain one of the points you have
made. One of the worst moves in a student paper is to follow a quotation with
the words “This means …”
·
Avoid quoting material that is already in quotes. Though it is permissible to quote
quoted material, you are better off avoiding it. When faced with a situation of
mandatory quoting, some students will scan their sources for words inside
quotation marks, thinking that “to quote” means “to take words you find inside
quotation marks.” In reality, these are the words you least want to quote. To begin with, words inside quotation marks
don’t belong to the writer of the article; they belong to someone else. So—as
much as possible—stick to those words that belong to the writer of your
source—words that are not found inside quotation marks. But if you must quote already-quoted material,
here’s how:
Suppose you have an article
written by a person named Weinstein. And within that article Weinstein quotes a
judge by the name of Justice Robert Jackson, and you want to use the
Some people feel we should
not worry too much about our civil liberties right now. According to Justice
Robert Jackson, “[t]he Constitution is not a suicide pact” (qtd. in Weinstein
1).
·
Avoid “clunky” quoting. Don’t do this: A
sentence of your own words. “A sentence of quoted material.” A sentence of your
own words. Instead, try to quote more gracefully. A sentence consisting
of 50% your words plus 50% quoted material will make for some graceful quoting.
·
Don’t use quoted material to repeat what you’ve said.
Often, quoted material that only
repeats what has already been said sounds comical. For example, according to The Research Paper Manual, “quoted
material that only repeats what has already been said sounds comical.”
·
When quoting directly, look for “peculiar wording and
phrasing.” The real point of using a
quotation is that you want to use a certain idea, and the writer of your source
material has worded that idea so wonderfully that you feel there is no better
way to express that idea. So you use the writer’s own words, which can best
express the idea in question. The following is a paragraph from The Myth of the Machine, by Lewis
Mumford:
One grants, of course, that we have
no proof that prehistoric man dreamed, in the sense that we have proof that he
used fire or made tools. But the existence of dreams, visions,
hallucinations, projections, is
well attested in all peoples at all times; and since dreams, unlike other
components of human culture, are involuntary reactions, over which the dreamer has little
or no effective control, it would be absurd to assume that they are a late intrusion.
In the previous paragraph, the
“peculiar wordings” are in boldface. It would be pointless, for example, to quote
a phrase like “we have no proof.” These words are common, and almost everyone
who wanted to express this idea would use the same four words. But it is highly
unlikely that another person would produce a list of four items consisting of
“dreams, visions, hallucinations, projections.” To use these four words,
arranged in a list as they are, would require quoting from the original text.
·
Ellipses. Ellipsis points show that you have left out some of the original material
from a quotation. Ellipsis points are good to use: they show the reader that
you mean to use only the “good stuff” from a quotation, not the pointless
material. There are a few ways to use ellipses:
1.
When
deleting material from the middle of a sentence. The original: Ellipsis points show that, in
situations in which you don’t need all the original material, you have left out
some of the original words. Your quoted version: Ellipsis points show that […] you have left out some of
the original words.
2.
When
deleting material from the end of a sentence. The original: Ellipsis points show that you have
left out some of the original words because you found the original words to
contain nothing essential. Your quoted version: Ellipsis points show that you have left out some of the
original words […] .
3.
When
deleting material that follows a period (an infrequent occurrence), the
ellipsis follows the period. Quoted sentence. […]
4.
Do not use
ellipses to lead in to a quotation, even if you have left out words from the
beginning of a sentence.
Some Notes on the Ellipses
In regular writing, the dot dot
dot will get the job done. But remember that ellipsis points are something you have added, not the original writer.
Therefore, in MLA style the square brackets are used to indicate that these are
your ellipsis points, not the original writer’s.
·
There must
always be a space on each side of the ellipses; in the case of MLA style, there
must be a space on each side of the square brackets.
Lean Toward
Shorter Quotations
There are three advantages of quoting
phrases instead of complete sentences and longer passages: (1) As mentioned
earlier, the strength of your essay lies in your own words and your own
thoughts. If the number of quoted words is too high, your essay will seem not
like an essay at all, but just a place to display a lot of neat quotations you
found. On the other hand, short quotations leave the focus on you—your voice,
your writing, your ideas. (2) Quoting phrases instead of longer passages makes
it easier for you to practice “graceful” quoting and to avoid “clunky” quoting.
(3) In any long passage, many of the words are common, simple words—“filler”
words. So why bother with the excess?
Trim the fat and leave yourself only the prime words that you really want, as
in the boldface phrases in the passage above.
When You Do
Use a Longer Quotation …
Quotations of five lines or more are
handles differently from shorter quotations. You precede longer quotations with
colons, you don’t use quotation marks, and you set your quotation in an inch
from the left margin. Example:
Tom
and Ray Magliozzi are not impressed by economists who conduct risk-benefit
analyses of phone use by drivers:
Other critics [of regulation
of cell phones]—some from prestigious “think tanks”—perform what appear to be
erudite cost/benefit analyses. The problem here is that the benefits are always
in units of convenience and productivity while the costs are in units of
injuries and people’s lives (2).
How to inset
text an inch: Select the
text you want to inset. Open the paragraph dialog box (Alt + O + P). Set
Indentation Left to 1 inch. Click OK.
Signal
Phrases
Signal phrases are synonyms for the
word “says.” You may use any signal phrase except
the word “says.” Here are your signal phrases:
author
is neutral: comments, describes,
explains, illustrates, mentions, notes, observes, points out, records, relates,
reports, sees, thinks, writes.
author
infers or suggests: analyzes, asks,
assesses, believes, concludes, considers, finds, predicts, proposes, reveals,
shows, speculates, suggests, supposes.
author
argues: claims, contends, defends,
disagrees, holds, insists, maintains.
author
agrees: accepts, admits, agrees,
concedes, concurs, grants.
author
is uneasy or negative: belittles,
bemoans, complains, condemns, deplores, deprecates, derides, laments, warns.
How to Use Signal Phrases
·
The signal phrase
can be placed first. Example: Freud claims
that what the boy most fears is that “his father will remove the offending sex
organ of the boy” (65).
In the previous example, note
that quoting in academic papers is not the same as writing dialogue in a
narrative. The key difference: When leading into a quotation, use “that”
instead of a comma.
·
The signal phrase
can be placed inside the quoted
material. Example: “The specific fear which the boy harbors,” grants
Freud, “is that his father will remove the offending sex organ of the boy”
(65). (When dropping a signal phrase in the middle of quoted material, you need
to have an ear for where that signal phrase will sound best.)
·
The signal phrase
at the end. “The specific fear which
the boy harbors is that his father will remove the offending sex organ of the
boy,” notes Freud (65).
Quoting Continued …
·
You may give the title of the book from which
you quote. Example: Sigmund Freud, in his book Civilization and Its Discontents,
observes that “[t]he specific fear which the boy harbors is that his
father will remove the offending sex organ of the boy” (65). Why the brackets?
Because the original contains a capital T, but we need a lower case t.
·
You may give the
person you quote some impressive
credentials. Example: Sigmund Freud, the renowned psychologist, concludes
that “[t]he specific fear which the boy harbors is that his father will remove
the offending sex organ of the boy” (65).
·
The author’s name will appear either in the text or in the citation
(inside parentheses), but not in both places. Placing the author’s name in the
citation would look like this: We
all are haunted by various fears, but among the worst must be the fear of the
removal of the “offending sex organ” (Freud 65).
Use Square Brackets to Indicate Any
Changes Made from the Original
·
Add explanatory words inside square
brackets. Example: “Oedipus was a prominent figure in Greek mythology who
killed his father [Laertes] and married his mother [Jocasta]” (Freud 65).
·
Use square
brackets to show a necessary change in verb
form. Example: As a child, Freud was troubled because he “love[d] his
mother and identifie[d] with his father” (65). (The original was loves and
identifies.)
Note
how, with verb tense change, it is often the case that only the end of the word
needs brackets. But there are also cases in which the entire word will need
brackets: a change from “was” to “is” would have to be written as [is].
·
Find a quotation
that you can lift from the middle of a sentence and place at the beginning of
your quotation. By so doing, you’ll use square brackets to indicate a lower case letter rewritten as a capital
letter. Example: “[H]e runs the risk of being physically banned by the
father,” admits Freud (65).
·
Find a quotation
that, for the sake of clarity,
requires a noun (inside square brackets) instead of a pronoun. “[Clytemnestra] blames
her mother for this condition and the cathexis for the mother is thereby
weakened,” insists Freud (65). (In the original, it was “She
blames …”
Titles That Appear in Your Text
Shorter
pieces (articles, short stories, poems, etc.) always get quotation marks.
Nothing else—just quotation marks.
Longer
works—like titles of books—get underlined. The standard rule for book titles is
to place book titles in italics. But in MLA style, book titles get underlined.
Quick List
·
Try to avoid
using material for which there is no author, like Wikipedia.
·
Use present
tense; signal phrases should be in present tense. In fact, your entire paper
should be in present tense.
·
Place the period after the in-text citation (the
parentheses) at the end of the sentence.
·
Don’t put the
writer’s name both in the sentence and in the in-text citation.
·
Don’t use “says.”
·
General
rule-of-thumb: those quotations used later in the paragraph tend to be better
than those used early in the paragraph.
The Laws of Grammar Still Apply
While
quoting, some students make the mistake of turning their quotation into a
run-on sentence:
Gangs are a huge problem in
some cities, “residents of high-crime communities are much more likely to
support gang-loitering ordinances” (Willard 353).
Two Ways to Quote
1. The
·
Henry David
Thoreau relates that “[he has] frequently seen a poet withdraw, having enjoyed
the most valuable part of a farm.”
2. The
·
To the
transcendentalists, the spiritual realm is more important than the physical;
and a poet, more than a farmer, will most likely “[enjoy] the most valuable
part of a farm” (Thoreau 243).