Integrating Quotes

11.8.06

Multicultural Literature

Mr. Kim El-Mallawany

Integrating Quotations in Your Writing As you probably already know and as many of you already practice, it is not acceptable to just insert quotes randomly into your essays. They must be introduced properly to the reader, and they must use an acceptable format. Many of you are already experts at the first of these methods, but we need to practice the other two. Just the Quote and the Speaker (with a signal verb): Sometimes, especially when sentences are getting too long, you might want to make a separate sentence that contains just the speaker and what they said. But ONLY do this when the previous or next sentence has explained or will explain the quotation in FULL. For example: August Wilson paints Levee’s character as a stereotypical contentious and disrespectful young black male, but then later complicates it when Levee explains to the other band members why he acts the way he acts. On page 68 Levee explains, “Levee got to be Levee! And he don’t need

nobody messing with him about the white man—cause you don’t know nothing about me. You don’t know Levee” (Wilson 68). Using a Colon: When you want to include a quotation that is a full thought (a full sentence) in itself, it often helps to use a colon (colons, as you may recall, are often used to mean “for example”). For example: Amiri Baraka would argue that the more popular the blues got, the less authentic it became: “the professionalism of classic blues

moved it to a certain extent out of the lives of Negroes” (Jones 87). Using Just a Sound-Clip (streamline): If you want to include a quotation or part of a text that is not a full thought (or sentence), you can just insert it into your sentence in the smoothest way possible, without any specific punctuation (except, of course, the quotation marks). For example: As blues has been called

“the first Negro music that appeared in a formal context as entertainment,” we must take this music form into account in any discussion about black art and performance, especially black art that is consumed by white audiences (Jones 86).