how to integrate quotes in a research paper

Quoting and integrating sources into your paper

In any study of a subject, people engage in a “conversation” of sorts, where they read or listen to others’ ideas, consider them with their own viewpoints, and then develop their own stance. It is important in this “conversation” to acknowledge when we use someone else’s words or ideas. If we didn’t come up with it ourselves, we need to tell our readers who did come up with it.

It is important to draw on the work of experts to formulate your own ideas. Quoting and paraphrasing the work of authors engaged in writing about your topic adds expert support to your argument and thesis statement. You are contributing to a scholarly conversation with scholars who are experts on your topic with your writing. This is the difference between a scholarly research paper and any other paper: you must include your own voice in your analysis and ideas alongside scholars or experts.

All your sources must relate to your thesis, or central argument, whether they are in agreement or not. It is a good idea to address all sides of the argument or thesis to make your stance stronger. There are two main ways to incorporate sources into your research paper.

Quoting is when you use the exact words from a source. You will need to put quotation marks around the words that are not your own and cite where they came from. For example:

“It wasn’t really a tune, but from the first note the beast’s eyes began to droop . . . Slowly the dog’s growls ceased – it tottered on its paws and fell to its knees, then it slumped to the ground, fast asleep” (Rowling 275).

Follow these guidelines when opting to cite a passage:

• Choose to quote passages that seem especially well phrased or are unique to the author or subject matter.
• Be selective in your quotations. Avoid over-quoting. You also don’t have to quote an entire passage. Use ellipses (. . .) to indicate omitted words. Check with your professor for their ideal length of quotations – some professors place word limits on how much of a sentence or paragraph you should quote.
• Before or after quoting a passage, include an explanation in which you interpret the significance of the quote for the reader. Avoid “hanging quotes” that have no context or introduction. It is better to err on the side of your reader not understanding your point until you spell it out for them, rather than assume readers will follow your thought process exactly.
• If you are having trouble paraphrasing (putting something into your own words), that may be a sign that you should quote it.
• Shorter quotes are generally incorporated into the flow of a sentence while longer quotes may be set off in “blocks.” Check your citation handbook for quoting guidelines.

Paraphrasing is when you state the ideas from another source in your own words . Even when you use your own words, if the ideas or facts came from another source, you need to cite where they came from. Quotation marks are not used. For example:

With the simple music of the flute, Harry lulled the dog to sleep (Rowling 275).

Follow these guidelines when opting to paraphrase a passage:

• Don’t take a passage and change a word here or there. You must write out the idea in your own words. Simply changing a few words from the original source or restating the information exactly using different words is considered plagiarism .
• Read the passage, reflect upon it, and restate it in a way that is meaningful to you within the context of your paper . You are using this to back up a point you are making, so your paraphrased content should be tailored to that point specifically.
• After reading the passage that you want to paraphrase, look away from it, and imagine explaining the main point to another person.
• After paraphrasing the passage, go back and compare it to the original. Are there any phrases that have come directly from the original source? If so, you should rephrase it or put the original in quotation marks. If you cannot state an idea in your own words, you should use the direct quotation.

A summary is similar to paraphrasing, but used in cases where you are trying to give an overview of many ideas. As in paraphrasing, quotation marks are not used, but a citation is still necessary. For example:

Through a combination of skill and their invisibility cloak, Harry, Ron, and Hermione slipped through Hogwarts to the dog’s room and down through the trapdoor within (Rowling 271-77).

Important guidelines

When integrating a source into your paper, remember to use these three important components:

• Introductory phrase to the source material : mention the author, date, or any other relevant information when introducing a quote or paraphrase.
• Source material : a direct quote, paraphrase, or summary with proper citation.
• Analysis of source material : your response, interpretations, or arguments regarding the source material should introduce or follow it. When incorporating source material into your paper, relate your source and analysis back to your original thesis.

Ideally, papers will contain a good balance of direct quotations, paraphrasing and your own thoughts. Too much reliance on quotations and paraphrasing can make it seem like you are only using the work of others and have no original thoughts on the topic.

Always properly cite an author’s original idea, whether you have directly quoted or paraphrased it. If you have questions about how to cite properly in your chosen citation style, browse these citation guides . You can also review our guide to understanding plagiarism .

University Writing Center

The University of Nevada, Reno Writing Center provides helpful guidance on quoting and paraphrasing and explains how to make sure your paraphrasing does not veer into plagiarism. If you have any questions about quoting or paraphrasing, or need help at any point in the writing process, schedule an appointment with the Writing Center.

Works Cited

Rowling, J.K. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone.  A.A. Levine Books, 1998.

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7 Tips for integrating quotes into a research paper [Updated 2023]

What are the best strategies for integrating quotes into your research paper? This post offers 7 tips for using evidence effectively.

1. Decide on the best quotes

As you're reading through the research that you've gathered for your paper, take note of the quotes that you might like to integrate into your work.

From there, you'll want to decide which are the best and most useful, since you'll likely have more material than you ultimately need. Some information can be paraphrased or left out entirely.

The best quotes express an idea or point in a way that perfectly captures the situation, concept, or thought. Keep this in mind as you decide which quotes to integrate into your paper.

2. Create quote sandwiches

How do you integrate a quote? You need to "sandwich" your quote within your own words. Never simply plop a quote into your work and assume that your reader will understand its significance. Instead, lead into the quote with your own words and then close it by providing analysis.

Here's an example of a quote sandwich:

In their 2016 study on transportation planning and quality of life, Lee and Sener argue that "efforts to incorporate health [into transportation planning] have primarily been framed from a physical health perspective rather than considering broader QOL [quality of life] impacts." Although planners have consistently addressed physical health and well-being in transportation plans, they have not necessarily factored in how mental and social health contributes to quality of life. Put differently, transportation planning has traditionally utilized a limited definition of quality of life and this has necessarily impacted data on the relationship between public transit and quality of life.

4. Use block quotes sparingly

Unless you're writing a literary analysis in which you need to closely read large sections of texts, you should use block quotes sparingly.

Typically, for every quote that you use, you need to supply analysis that is at least as long as the quote itself. So, if you use a block quote, you'll need to provide enough substantive analysis to justify the use of a longer quote.

3. Segment longer quotes

To avoid using too many block quotes, you can segment longer quotes into shorter snippets or sentences. Excise the key words or phrases from the quote and then sandwich those within your own words.

Alternately, you can skip parts of longer quotes by removing material and substituting an ellipsis [...]. Here's an example of both quote segments and ellipsis:

“The blank spaces of Renaissance books,” Sherman explains, “were used to record not just comments on the text but penmanship exercises, prayers, recipes, popular poetry, [...] and other glimpses of the world in which they circulated” (15).

5. Provide adequate analysis

Every quote that you use needs to be accompanied by thorough analysis. If you're writing a literature paper , you'll need to provide a close reading of the quotes that you've included from literary texts.

For other types of papers, you might provide an analysis of what the quote said, but you'll also want to consider how that quote fits into your broader argument.

6. Make your quotes talk to each other

The point of utilizing quotes in your research is not simply to provide evidence in support of your main points. Quotes also represent significant instances of an ongoing scholarly conversation. As a result, you should make your quotes talk to each other.

You might do this in a formal way through a literature review or state-of-the-field, but you can also consider throughout your paper how different pieces of evidence reflect patterns, points of comparison, or divergences in the research landscape. Here's an example:

Elizabeth Patton, in her research on Catholic women’s “bookscapes,” contends that the staunchest Catholic families maintained textual networks in which they circulated books that were banned in Protestant England, including copies of medieval devotional manuscripts. Likewise, Jenna Lay claims that “Catholic women resisted any easy demarcation between a Catholic medieval past and a Protestant, reformed present in both their religious practices and their print and manuscript books,” an argument that can be extended to include entire Catholic families, as I will explore below (16). However, despite the fact that scholars such as Patton, Lay, and Jennifer Summit have argued that “we stand to learn much when we determine […] whether the early modern collector of a medieval devotional book was a Catholic or Protestant,” few studies have explored in any depth how Catholics used their books in the post-Reformation period.

7. Include correct in-text citations

If you are integrating direct quotes into your research paper, you'll need to include in-text citations that give proper credit for the borrowed material.

You can use BibGuru's citation generator to create your in-text citations and copy them to your document. Be sure to consult your assignment guidelines , or your instructor, to find out what citation style is required.

The bottom line

Integrating quotes into your paper can be overwhelming, especially if you are writing a longer paper. However, if you plan ahead and follow the above tips, you'll be able to incorporate evidence effectively.

Frequently Asked Questions about class presentations

To integrate quotes into your essay, create a quote sandwich. That is, always lead into a quote with your own words and then provide analysis after the quote.

You can integrate a long quote into your paper in one of two ways: through block quotes or by breaking quotes up into smaller segments.

To skip part of a quote, simply remove the unwanted text and substitute an ellipsis like this: [...]. Be sure that the statement retains its meaning and logic.

If you want to end a quote before its formal punctuation, you can simply provide a full stop or other ending punctuation where you would like to quote to end. However, make sure that the statement still makes sense in relation to the sentences and/or phrases that occur before and after it.

All borrowed quotes need accompanying in-text citations. You should consult your assignment guidelines, class syllabus, or instructor to find out which citation style is required. Use BibGuru's citation generator to create in-text citations and copy them to your document.

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Integrating Quotations in MLA Style

Integrating Quotations (MLA)

A reader may be able to make sense of a quotation dropped into a piece of writing, but introducing or integrating quotations into the flow of your sentence is the way to use them most effectively—to be sure that your reader knows what you mean. You have three options: 

• Introduce the quotation with a statement that puts it in context. A colon follows a formal statement or independent clause.
• Lynn Quitman Troyka warns us of the particular challenges of using quotations in research papers: “The greatest risk you take when you use quotations is that you will end up with choppy, incoherent sentences” (184). 
• Use a signal phrase followed by a comma or a signal verb followed by that to announce a quotation.
• According to Lynn Quitman Troyka, “. . ..”
• The narrator suggests that “. . ..”
• As Jake Barnes says, “. . . . . ..”
• Frye rejects this notion when he argues, “. . ..”
• Integrate the quotation fully into your sentence. The quotation and your words must add up to a complete sentence.
• We know the boy has learned a painful lesson when he says that his eyes “burned with anguish and anger” (Joyce 481). 
• Leaders are inspirational; they are concerned with “providing meaning or purpose in work for employees and creating meaning in the product for customers” (Ivancevich, Lorenzi, and Skinner 341).  
• Researchers found that firms with a strong corporate culture “based on a foundation of shared values” outperformed the other firms by a large margin (Quigley 42).

Quotations within Quotations:

Use single quotation marks to enclose a quotation within a quotation.

• Miller states, “Religions are examples of ‘noble lies’ aimed at uplifting human stature” (18).

Adding Material within Quotations:

Use square brackets to enclose material that you add to or change within a quotation to allow it to fit grammatically into a sentence. 

• Balko (2015) argues, “If they [policymakers] want to fight obesity, they’ll halt the creeping 

socialization of medicine” (p. 142).

• “Today, the [saturated fat] warnings remain a cornerstone of the government’s dietary guidelines,” O’Connor (2016) states, “though in recent years the American Heart Association has also begun to warn that too much added sugar may increase cardiovascular disease risk” (p.92). 

Block Quotations:

Indent longer quotations (more than four lines) ten spaces from the margin. Notice that quotation marks are not used to enclose material that is set off from the text and that the parenthetical reference is placed after the punctuation following the quotation. 

A socially responsible vision can make an organization more attractive to customers, potential employees, and investors.  As consultant Robert Rosen puts it,  

The best companies are values-based and performance-driven.  Their community involvement supports the mission of the business.  Modern employees want to work for companies who make a difference, their customers want to do business with them because they have solid reputations as good corporate citizens, and shareholders enjoy the value such companies represent over the long term. (9)

Shortening Quotations:

Use an ellipsis of three dots to shorten longer quotations by removing non-essential words and ideas from the middle of the quote.  The quotation must fit grammatically into the sentence even with the ellipsis.   It must also retain enough of the quotation so that it still makes sense in your essay and you do not distort its meaning.   You do not need to provide ellipses at the beginning or the end of the quoted material. 

Foer states, “My grandmother survived World War II barefoot, scavenging Eastern Europe for other people’s inedibles . . . So she never cared if I colored outside the lines, as long as I cut coupons along the dashes” (159). 

Complete quote: “My grandmother survived World War II barefoot, scavenging Eastern Europe for other people’s inedibles: rotting potatoes, discarded scraps of meat, skins and the bits that clung to bones and pits. So she never cared if I colored outside the lines, as long as I cut coupons along the dashes.” 

Quick tip about citing sources in MLA style

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Integrating Direct Quotations into Your Writing

by acburton | Mar 21, 2024 | Resources for Students , Writing Resources

If you’ve ever had a professor ask you to “use quotes” or quote other texts in your writing before, you know that it’s no easy task. It can feel awkward sometimes to determine what parts of the text are worth quoting, as well as how to directly quote in your writing without sounding too formulaic or repetitive. Keep reading for some strategies on effectively using direct quotations in your next writing project!

Why do I need to know how to directly quote?

If you’ve seen our blog post on “Quoting Directly,” you know that using direct quotations (or “quotes”) in our writing can be useful for a variety of reasons. By quoting other credible, relevant sources in our own writing projects, we can provide more convincing evidence and reasoning for our own ideas. Direct quotations are a type of support we can provide for our own arguments and claims, as it demonstrates to our readers that other writers agree with what we have to say.

What are different ways to directly quote in my writing so that I don’t sound repetitive?

A common way to integrate “quotes” in our writing is with the use of a signal phrase , which is a short phrase that indicates to readers that the writer is about to introduce another source. For example, we often use the phrase “According to” as a common signal phrase for introducing quotations. However, if we were to use “According to” for every single quotation in our essays, our writing would start to sound awfully repetitive and potentially boring or uninteresting.

So, here are some different approaches you can take for integrating direct quotations to have more variety and style in your writing!

1. Use a signal phrase to introduce the quotation

The two most commonly used signal phrases only require a couple of words, primarily a verb and the author’s name:

• The introductory phrase: “According to (author’s name and/or title of source),”. e.g., “According to Ahmed,” or “According to Ulmer in Internet Invention ,”.

After a signal phrase, you can quote from the text directly. Here are some important reminders to keep in mind whenever you directly quote another source in your own writing:

•  Use quotation marks “ “ and copy the passage exactly as it appears in the original text. If there is a grammatical or spelling error in the original source, you can use [sic] to cue to your reader that you did not make the mistake and are intentionally quoting the source material (for more on using [sic] in direct quotations, see our post on Quoting Directly ).
• Long Quotations in MLA format
• Long Quotations in APA format

Note: You can also use a signal phrase after the direct quotation for more variety in your sentence structure and style. You’d follow the same rules, except the quotation would come first, followed by your ‘says’ verb and the author.

It is usually better to lead with the author’s name and a ‘says’ verb because this introduces where the quotation is coming from (ensuring your reader is not confused) and is written in active voice, which is more direct and concise.

Example According to Melissa Dahl, “[Cringe is] the intense visceral reaction produced by an awkward moment, an unpleasant kind of self-recognition where you suddenly see yourself through someone else’s eyes. It’s a forced moment of self-awareness, and it usually makes you cognizant of the disappointing fact that you aren’t measuring up to your own self-concept” (Wynn).

While this is a direct quotation attributed to author Melissa Dahl, the in-text citation is credited to (Wynn) because the writer found this quotation in an original source published by Natalie Wynn. If you directly quote an author or writer whose work is quoted by another source, you cite the source that “houses” the passage. In other words, you cite the author who introduced you to the work. You can still credit the original author by introducing them in your signal phrase, as shown in the example above, but make sure your in-text citation credits the source you found the passage in.

2. Summarize the main ideas of the quotation to create a framework for the quotation, then use a colon to present the quotation.

For this method, you would provide a concise overview of the main ideas from the passage you wish to quote as a way of contextualizing what the source is about. This provides a helpful framework for the reader to understand the purpose and meaning of your quote better.

Example In Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust: A History of Walking, she raises several theoretical and philosophical viewpoints concerning both the act of walking, or flânerie, and the walker, or flâneur. On escapism, Solnit posits: “In the city, one is alone because the world is made up of strangers, and to be a stranger surrounded by strangers, to walk along silently bearing one’s secrets and imagining those of the people one passes, is among the starkest of luxuries” (23).

3. Blend a shorter quotation into your own sentence structure

This is the best method to use if you have only a short passage, some key words, or a specific phrase you want to quote in your writing. For this method, you want to build your own original sentence that leads up to the key ideas in your short quotation to blend it together as one cohesive sentence.

Example Within a participatory culture, individuals are often gathered together as a community due to shared interest networks, like video games, in which “members believe that their contributions matter” and there is “some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices” (Jenkins 7).

Practice in the Writing Center

For more support and guidance on directly quoting, make an appointment with us here at the Writing Center! We can help you integrate “quotes” into your writing projects effectively and with style so that your support is interesting and convincing to readers.

For further reading, check out these resources from the Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) International Association:

• Integrate Quotations in Writing, by Carla Mannix (2017)
• List of Reporting Verbs, from University of Technology Sydney

***Adapted from TESOL International Association Handout “Integrate Quotations in Writing” by Carla Mannix, Nov. 2017

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APA 7th Edition Guide: Integrating Sources

• Welcome to APA - Why We Cite
• APA-When We Cite
• APA-How We Cite
• APA-Samples (References and Papers)
• Formatting in a Flash
• Integrating Sources
• Research Process

Before You Begin - Tips

• Introduction

To use your sources (books, articles, interviews, blogs, etc.) in a research paper, there are three main techniques. 

Direct Quotes

Paraphrasing

Summarizing

For each of these techniques, you will need to Signal, Cite, and Comment. Signaling allows the reader to know that you are incorporating another writer's ideas, the citation gives information about where the information came from, and the comments will show your reader how this information supports your ideas. For more information about how this works, check out the the strategies on this page.

Remember, sources are important to strengthen your argument, show contradicting opinions, share statistics, and lead your reader to more information about your topic. Using and citing sources allows your excellent research to show through and help to establish you as a credible writer.

Tip #1: Read your assignment carefully. Understand what your teacher expects. Pay attention to the instructions about types of sources that are acceptable.

Tip #2:  Plan your paper using the assignment instructions. Choose a topic, angle, or perspective that meets the criteria for the paper. Do some preliminary research or critical thinking and create an outline to guide you to explore, argue, or explain your topic.

Tip #3:  Choose credible resources that will support your paper. Make sure the content of the sources will support or argue the points in your outline. For more information about credibility, see the links at the top of this page for help in finding sources and also check out the Identify and Evaluate link to make sure your source is legit.

Tip #4: Follow your instructors' assignment guidelines carefully but do not over-rely on your sources. A research paper requires that you choose a topic to explore and find sources to support your ideas. Therefore, you should expound upon or explain how your source further strengthens your argument or idea. Instructors expect that no more than 20-30% of your paper will be comprised of material from other sources. Too much material from other sources will overpower YOUR writing.

Tip #5: When you use the three strategies (direct quotes, paraphrasing, summarizing), you must use an in-text citation and also include that source in your bibliography or works cited page. For more information about formatting, see the tab for Citations.

• APA Block, Long Direct Quotes
• MLA Block, Long Direct Quotes

Guidelines for Direct Quotes

A direct quote uses the exact words of a source. .

Think of the quote as a rare and precious jewel. 

Quotes can be super-effective in getting your point across to the reader. Just be sure you’re not stringing a bunch of quotes together – you want your voice to be stronger than the voice of your sources. You always need to interpret, analyze, add to and explain more about the quote to your reader.  

Here are some guidelines to help you decide when to use quotes:

• Wording that is so memorable, unforgettable or powerful, or expresses a point so perfectly, that you cannot change it without weakening the meaning.
• An important passage is so dense or rich that it requires you to analyze it closely. This requires that the passage be quoted so the reader can follow your analysis.
• A claim you are making is such that the doubting reader will want to hear exactly what the source said. This is mostly when you criticize or disagree with a source. You want your reader to know you aren't misrepresenting the source.
• Your attempts to paraphrase or summarize are awkward or much longer than the source material.

You may choose to quote an entire passage from a source or just words or phrases. Make sure to use signal words (see below) to move between your ideas and the words of your source. Also, always cite your work. 

Direct Quotes (MLA format):

As one of Obama's deputy assistants Yohannes Abraham explains, "It's really important to remember to just be a good person" (Scherer, Miller, and Elliott 36). 

As William Kneale suggests, some humans have a "moral deafness" which is never punctured no matter what the moral treatment (93).

For Charles Dickens, the eighteenth century was both "the best of times" and "the worst of times" (35). 

Direct Quotes (APA format)

As Ali Akbar Hamemi remarked, "There is no doubt that America is a super-power in the world and we cannot ignore them" (Vick, 2017, p. 13). 

Sometimes it may be necessary to include long direct quotes (of over 40 words) in your work if you are unable to paraphrase or summarize. A long quote is treated differently as a block quotation with a .5 inch margin from the left but still double-spaced.  Notice that there are no quotation marks around the block quotations even though these are direct quotes.  Here are two examples:

Block quotation with parenthetical citation:

Researchers found when studying gray wolves that coloring around eyes may change over the lifespan:

Facial color patterns change with growth in many American  canid  species, although no studies have directly examined such developmental changes. For example, all newborn gray wolves observed in the present study had dark-colored bodies and C-type faces with dark-colored irises. (Ueda et al., 2014, p. 4)

Ueda, S., Kumagai, G., Otaki, Y., Yamaguchi, S., & Kohshima, S. (2014). A comparison of facial color pattern and gazing behavior in canid species suggests gaze communication in gray wolves (canis lupus).  PLoS One,  9 (6) doi:https://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0098217

Block quotation with narrative citation:

Manning and Kaler (2011) describe the difficulties of using survey methods when observing owls:

Survey  methods with observers outside the vehicle were 3 times more likely to displace an owl than a single vehicle stop where observers remained inside the vehicle. Owls were displaced farther distances by all survey methods compared to control trials, but distances and time displaced did not differ among survey methods.

Manning, J. A., & Kaler, R. S. A. (2011). Effects of survey methods on burrowing owl behaviors.  Journal of Wildlife Management,  75 (3), 525-530. Retrieved from https://proxy154.nclive.org/login?url=https://search.proquest.com/docview/925615280?accountid=13601

For more information, see page 272 of the   Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association , 7 th  ed.

If a quote runs more than four lines long, you must block the quote with a .5 margin on the left. Do not use quotation marks even though it's a direct quote.

At the conclusion of  Lord of the Flies,  Ralph, realizing the horror of his actions, is overcome by

great, shuddering spasms of grief that seemed to wrench his whole body. his voice rose under the black smoke before the burning wreckage of the island; and infected by that emotion, the other little boys began to shake and sob too. (Golding 186)

So, when using quotes:

• Always have a good reason  for using a direct quote. Otherwise, paraphrase or summarize.
• Do not allow quotes to speak for themselves . Your research paper is about communicating YOUR IDEAS.  Your research simply helps prove or support those ideas.
• Always make sure you  provide an analysis of the quote .  Show your readers that you understand how the quote relates to your ideas by analyzing its significance.
• Do not use quotes as padding . If quotes do not have adequate analysis, readers will feel that you don’t have a grasp on what that quote means, and they also might feel that you are using quotes as “filler” to take up space.
• Use no more than 2 direct quotes per paragraph .
• Carefully integrate quotations into your text so that they flow smoothly and clearly into the surrounding sentences. Use a signal phrase or signal verb, such as those in the following example:

As Thompson (2020) makes clear, Youtube's  algorithms "can’t distinguish between true and false data, except in the most crude way" (para. 5).  

Paraphrasing/Summarizing

• APA Long Paraphrase
• MLA Long Paraphrase

Guidelines for Paraphrasing and Summarizing

Think of Paraphrases and Summaries as your foundations

Paraphrase and summarize long passages where the main point is important to the point you are making, but the details are not . You should use paraphrasing and summarizing much more often than direct quotes. A good balance would be 75% paraphrasing and summarizing and 25% direct quotes.

Paraphrase:  You are paraphrasing when you take someone else’s words and rewrite them in your own words without altering the meaning or providing interpretation. Paraphrases are about the same length as the original. Always cite your paraphrase. Summarize: You are summarizing  when you condense the author's words or ideas without altering the meaning or providing interpretation using your own words -- basically, you’re presenting the original information in a nutshell. Always cite it.

Examples of Paraphrases

Introduce paraphrases clearly in your text, usually with a signal phrase that includes the author of the source. Here is original text and paraphrased text.

Volunteers feel more socially connected, they're less lonely, and suffer from depression less, studies show. Volunteering creates physical benefits too: Regular volunteers are less likely to develop  high blood pressure  and live longer, some studies show. (text is from "Dalai Lama: 5 Things to Keep in Mind for the Next Four Years" from CNN.com, written by Jen Christensen)

Paraphrased text in APA style:

Volunteering has psychological and physical benefits, according to studies. Along with being less depressed and lonely, volunteers also live longer and are less likely to have high blood pressure (Christensen, 2017).

Paraphrased text in MLA style:

Volunteering has psychological and physical benefits, according to studies. Along with being less depressed and lonely, volunteers also live longer and are less likely to have high blood pressure (Christensen).

Examples of Summaries

Summaries, too, need to be carefully integrated into your text.   Make sure to signal the reader that you are summarizing and include the correct citation.

Here is an example of a summary in APA format:

In Christensen's article, she explores Dalai Lama's advice to people who want to find happiness in an uncertain world. His Holiness believes that people should focus on developing compassion, letting go of anger, self-reflecting, helping others, and being playful like children (Christensen, 2017). 

Here's the summary in MLA format:

In Christensen's article, she explores Dalai Lama's advice to people who want to find happiness in an uncertain world. His Holiness believes that people should focus on developing compassion, letting go of anger, self-reflecting, helping others, and being playful like children (Christensen). 

Whenever you include summaries, paraphrases, or quotations in your own writing, it is important that you identify the sources of the material; even unintentional failure to cite material is plagiarism. Be especially careful with paraphrases and summaries, where there are no quotation marks to remind you that the material is not your own.

Often, long paraphrases continue for multiple sentences. Usually you'll intext cite the source in the first sentence. It is not necessary to cite every single sentence IF you've made it clear in the narrative that the information discussed is from the before-mentioned source.

*Note that the bold words show where the information is coming from . Students should NOT bold the words.

Here's an example:

Tucker and Maddey (2020) found that predatory behavior in dogs is due to many different factors. One of the factors is the physical territory of the alleged threat. The research found that "dogs are more willing to attack or defend territory that is considered to be their own" (Tucker & Maddey, 2020, p. 81) . Another factor they discovered is that dogs are more willing to prey on a threat if their human owners are nearby. In an experiment conducted over multiple days using cameras, Tucker and Maddey  discovered that dogs were shown to be much more protective with predatory behavior when their owners were in the vicinity they when the owners were away. In conclusion, the research shows that dogs have innate predatory behavior traits which are enhanced by the dogs' desires to protect their human owners (Tucker & Maddey, 2020) .   

If you're using information from a source more than once in a row (with no other sources referred to in between), you can use a simplified in-text citation. The first time you use information from the source, use a full in-text citation. The second time, you only need to give the page number.

Cell biology is an area of science that focuses on the structure and function of cells (Smith 15). It revolves around the idea that the cell is a "fundamental unit of life" (17). Many important scientists have contributed to the evolution of cell biology. Mattias Jakob Schleiden and Theodor Schwann, for example, were scientists who formulated cell theory in 1838 (20). 

*Thank you to the Library at Columbia College for this example.

Reasons why you would want to paraphrase from a source:

• To change the organization of ideas for emphasis.  You may have to change the organization of ideas in the passages you pull from your sources so that you can emphasize the points  most related to your paper.  Be sure to restate in your own words, but don’t change the meaning.
• To simplify the material.  You may have to simplify complex arguments, sentences, or vocabulary.
• To clarify the material.  You may have rewrite to clarify technical passages or put specialized information into language your audience will be better able to understand.

Paraphrasing is a valuable skill because:

• It is better than quoting information from a passage that doesn't have memorable or important words or phrases
• It helps you control the temptation to quote too much
• It allows the writer to put the idea of a source into their own voice (but always cite it to show it is someone else's idea).

Tips on Summarizing:

A summary is a  condensed  version of someone else’s writing. Like paraphrasing, summarizing involves using your own words and writing style to express another author’s ideas. Unlike the paraphrase, which presents important details, the summary presents only the most important ideas of the passage. For example, you could summarize a book in a sentence, or in several paragraphs, depending on your writing situation and audience. You may use the summary often for the following reasons:

• To condense the material. You may have to condense or reduce the source material to pull out the  points that relate to your paper.
• To omit extras from the material. You may have to leave out extra information from the source material so you can focus on the author’s main points.
• To simplify the material.  You may have to simply the most important complex arguments, sentences or vocabulary in the source material.

When you decide to  summarize or paraphrase, avoid the following:

• keeping the same structure of ideas and/or sentence structure
• just changing some of the words
• adding your ideas into the summary - be faithful to the meaning of the source material.
• forgetting to cite your sources and use signal words.

What about Plagiarism?

Plagiarism is using someone's words and passing them off as your own . Plagiarism is  dishonest and unethical and can cause serious repercussions for students in a college setting. Plagiarism can be intentional or accidental, however most students plagiarize by not summarizing or citing correctly. Here are tips for avoiding plagiarism:

• Plan your paper and allow yourself time . By creating an outline, allowing yourself enough time, and focusing on your purpose you are less likely to heavily copy another writer's work. 
• Choose credible sources that contain the information that you'll need for your citations.
• Keep up with your sources .
• Take good notes (that include the source).
• Read in chunks and don't try to paraphrase and summarizing sentence by sentence. By reading a chunk of information and pulling out the most relevant or important information, you are able to summarize or paraphrase what is most important to your purpose.
• Use in-text citations throughout planning and writing of your paper.
• Even when you change words, do not imitate the sentence structure of your source.
• No matter what you think, it is NOT ok to copy; even if you think your teacher doesn't care or won't notice.
• When in doubt, cite your source. 

Citing a Source Within a Source (Secondhand or Secondary Source)

Academic articles, books, and other sources often refer to previously published articles, books and other sources. You'll usually see the author of the previous source in the sentence or in the intext citation.

You will NOT include this source as if you read the study yourself.

For example, there is a paper written by Anderson that is referred to in an article written by Robb. You read the article by Robb; NOT the paper by Anderson. This is what you write:

According to Anderson's 2013 study (as cited in Robb, 2019), learning APA "can be difficult, especially when students are focusing on content area and not writing styles" (p. 33). In addition, some elements of APA seem subjective to students (Anderson, 2013 as cited in Robb, 2019).

In the reference list, you include the article you read; not the article you read about.

Robb, L. (2019). Librarianship in community colleges. Journal of Libraries , 110(2), 31-35. https://doil.something/something/000000. 

Signal Words

Signal verbs to help you introduce the quote.

Signal phrases introduce the material, often including the author's name. Remember that the signal verb must be appropriate to the idea you are expressing.

acknowledges * concludes * emphasizes * replies * advises * concurs * expresses * reports * agrees * confirms * interprets * responds * allows * criticizes * lists * reveals * answers * declares * objects * says * asserts * describes * observes * states * believes * disagrees * offers * suggests * charges * discusses * opposes * thinks * claims * disputes * remarks * writes

MLA Citations - Overview

Contributors' names. "Title of Resource."  Name of Container, Publisher, Last edited date.

Russell, Tony, et al. "MLA Formatting and Style Guide."  The Purdue OWL . Purdue U Writing Lab, 2 Aug. 2016.

In-text is (Author page#) or if no author (“Title” page#)

(Taylor 55) or (”Price of Freedom Museum”)

MLA 8 Citation for Websites with No Author

“Title of Web Page.”  Title of Website , Publisher, Date published in Day Month Year format, URL.

“One Health and Disease: Tick-Borne.”  National Park Service , U.S. Department of the Interior, 12 June 2018, https://www.nps.gov/articles/one-health-disease-ticks-borne.htm.

APA Citations - Overview

Author, I. (Date). Title. Container , page#.

Berndt, T. J. (2002). Friendship quality and social development. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 11, 7-10.

In-text is (Author, date, p. #)

According to Jones (1998), APA style is a difficult citation format for first-time learners.

APA style is a difficult citation format for first-time learners (Jones, 1998, p. 199).

Resources to Teach and Learn Incorporating Sources

• Incorporating Sources PPT from RCCC Powerpoint created for workshops at RCCC.
• MLA Sample Paper for Future Job Created for ACA class at RCCC
• APA7/MLA Annotated Bib Example for ENG112 (updated January 2020) This annotated bib has an MLA header and assignment information and APA7 citations. This meets the criteria for ENG112 and Issues in the Occupation or Discourse Community. Only Level 1 Headings are used in this paper.
• APA7 Citation Style Handout (updated May 2022)
• APA7 Paper Template with Comments Word Doc (updated December 2019)

A Word about Patchwriting from Xavier University

• What is Patchwriting?
• Why Patchwriting is a Problem

Patchwriting Definition

“Copying from a source text and then deleting some words, altering grammatical structures, or plugging in one-for-one synonym-substitutes.”

Howard, Rebecca Moore. “A Plagiarism Pentimento.” Journal of Teaching Writing  vol. 11, no. 2, Jan.1992, pp. 233–45.  http://www.citationproject.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Howard-Plagiarism-Pentimento.pdf

Patchwriting is an attempt to put a source into your own words, but still fails to be a synthesis of the original. While it appears to put things in your own words, it’s still too close to the original.

For example:

• Patching over the original source with substitutions or deletions.
• Reflecting the original structure or organization by not producing a fully independent claim.
• Incomplete citations.

Information is from the Xavier University Libraries at https://libguides.xavier.edu/c.php?g=1004286&p=7274151

From Sharkey-Smith, Matt. “Patchwork Paraphrasing.” Walden University Writing Center. 27 May 2014.     http://waldenwritingcenter.blogspot.com/2014/05/patchwork-paraphrasing.html

Why is patchwriting a problem?

Patchwriting doesn’t demonstrate synthesis or a full understanding of the original source. Substituting synonyms or rewording the structure of the statements is patchwriting and is not synthesis of information.

While it appears to put things in your own words, it’s still too close to the original. It appears to give credit to the source, but doesn’t acknowledge just how much is still mimicking the original source’s language and sentence structure.

Source Synthesis

To successfully synthesize (or integrate, or put together, or blend) your sources into your own writing, you need to think about balancing the amount of your own writing with the other sources you are using. For example, look at the following texts. The highlighted text is from other sources.

Writing #1      

     Composting is a great way to use grass clippings, shredded leaves, and even discarded food items to add nutrients to your yard or garden. The key to composting is to have brown materials (shredded dry leaves, twigs, and branches) and green materials (grass clippings and kitchen scraps) as well as water to keep the mixture moist.  Willi Evans Galloway writes in Organic Gardener that the right equation for composting is “ Compost  = Air + Water + 2 Parts Browns + 1 Part Greens” (2004) . The brown materials contain carbon and the green materials contain nitrogen which are necessary for bacteria and fungi, as well as larger organisms such as worms, to live and speed up the decomposing process (USDA, n.d.). The EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) also suggests using a tarp over the compost pile to increase the heat and speed up the decomposition process (2017). Although creating a compost pile does require a little maintenance and an occasional toss to keep good air flow, the benefits are reducing food waste as well as putting yard waste to good use.  

Writing #2      

     Composting is a great way to use yard and food waste to add nutrients to the yard. “Composting speeds the process by providing an ideal environment for bacteria and other decomposing microorganisms. The final product, humus or compost, looks and feels like fertile garden soil. This dark, crumbly, earthy-smelling stuff works wonders on all kinds of soil and provides vital nutrients to help plants grow and look better” (USDA, n.d.). The brown materials contain carbon and the green materials contain nitrogen which are necessary for bacteria and fungi, as well as larger organisms such as worms, to live and speed up the decomposing process (USDA, n.d.). According to the USDA (n.d.), “compost can be used for all your planting needs. Compost is an excellent source of organic matter to add to your garden or potted plants. It helps improve soil structure which contributes to good aeration and moisture-holding capacity. Compost is also a source of plant nutrients” (USDA, n.d.). Although creating a compost pile does require a little maintenance and an occasional toss to keep good air flow, the benefits are reducing food waste as well as putting yard waste to good use. 

Writing #3      

     Composting is a great way to use grass clippings, shredded leaves, and even discarded food items to add nutrients to your yard or garden. The key to composting is to have brown materials (shredded dry leaves, twigs, and branches) and green materials (grass clippings and kitchen scraps) as well as water to keep the mixture moist. There is an equation for compost that is air+water+2 parts browns + 1 part greens. Carbon is in the brown materials and nitrogen is in the green materials. Both of these are important to support worms, bacteria and other organisms that break down materials. The EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) also suggests using a tarp over the compost pile to increase the heat and speed up the decomposition process (2017). Although creating a compost pile does require a little maintenance and an occasional toss to keep good air flow, the benefits are reducing food waste as well as putting yard waste to good use. 

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Jerz's Literacy Weblog (est. 1999)

Integrated quotes: citing sources effectively in mla-style papers.

Jerz > Writing > Academic  > [ Argument |  Titles | Thesis Statements | Blueprinting  | Quoting | Citing |  MLA Format  ]

Rather than interrupting your ideas with long chunks from other sources, prefer integrated quotations — short, meaningful quotes that work organically with the grammar of your original sentence, invoking outside evidence with power and precision.  (See also: Academic Writing ;  Thesis Statements .)

Integrate Brief Quotations from Outside Sources

If you bring your essay to a screeching halt in order to introduce the full name and credentials of each author, you will bury whatever argument you were trying to make.

Spot the Wordy Formula

Efficient revision, three potential ways to apply borrowed material.

The following examples show three different ways that the same quoted material could be used to advance an original argument, by directly tying the material from one source to related material from another source.

 Integrate Borrowed Material Smoothly and Efficiently

Avoid clunky, high-schoolish documentation like the following:.

Don’t expend words writing about quotes and sources.  If you provide a lengthy introduction such as “In the book  My Big Boring Academic Study , by Professor H. Pompous Windbag III, it says” or “the following quote by a government study shows that…” you are wasting words that would be better spent developing your ideas.

Using about the same space as the original, see how MLA style helps an author devote more words to developing the idea more fully. We shall continue to revise the above example:

If your college instructor wants you to cite every fact or opinion you find in an outside source, how do you make room for your own opinion?

• Paraphrase. You can introduce studies that agree with you (Smith 123; Jones and Chin 123) and those that disagree with you (Mohan and Corbett 200) without interrupting your own argument. (See what I did there?)
• Quote Selectively . If you must use the original author’s language,  work a few words from the outside source into a sentence you wrote yourself . (If you can’t supply at least as many words of your own analysis of and rebuttal to the quoted passage, then you are probably padding.)
• Avoid Summary . Summarizing someone else’s ideas is one of the easiest ways to churn out words; while students often turn to summary when they want to boost their word count, paragraphs that merely summarize are not as intellectually engaging, and therefore not worth as many points, as paragraphs that analyze, synthesize, and evaluate. See “ Writing that Demonstrates Thinking Ability .”)

While MLA Style generally expects authors to save details for the Works Cited pages, there’s nothing wrong with introducing the work more fully — if you have a good reason to do so.

For example, in a paper on the history of the typewriter, you might want to refer to the typist who appears in T. S. Eliot’s poem, “The Waste Land.” If so, you should identify the source as a poem, so that reader won’t mistake the reference for an academic article. In a similar way, if your paper mainly cites poets, you might need to identify somebody else as an editor or literary critic. Or, perhaps you feel that a particular author’s nationality, ethnicity, gender, age, or education level may affect the relevance of a particular point raised by the author.

Don’t give the full, high-schoolish introduction without a good reason — the presence of irrelevant details is a signal to your reader that you don’t know what you want to say.

Integrated Quotes Facilitate Smarter Writing

How good is a composer who only lets one instrument play at a time? Would you like a pizza that was served to you first as a dry round crust, then a bowl of tomato sauce, then a hunk of cheese?

Avoid a rigid, simplistic organizational structure focused only on summarizing or reflecting on the sources you have found. It’s not possible to think about an issue in a complex way if you examine only one source per paragraph.

Consider instead the following, more intellectually complex use of sources:

03 Oct 2007 — extracted and expanded from a handout that focused on finding good sources . 04 Nov 2011 — reorganization and updates 20 Dec 2016 — further reorganization and updates 06 Dec 2017 — expanded Kanye example

12 thoughts on “ Integrated Quotes: Citing Sources Effectively in MLA-Style Papers ”

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Pingback: Links for exercises on using sources |

great posting thanks a lot !!

still confused on how to insert things when needed and basically using it in general paper is due wednesday rough draft

Leslie, it’s great that your instructor is giving you the chance to revise. He or she is doing twice or three times the work it would take just to give you a single grade, and you will learn a lot if you take full advantage of the opportunity.

You are bang on correct!

I’m looking at the author’s footnote, and it says “…STATISTICS”.

So I Google the article in the NYT by it’s title: “Belt-Loosening in the Work Force” (NYT 2 Mar 2003)

and the article’s author writes:

______________________________________

The economists — Shin-Yi Chou, Henry Saffer and Michael Grossman — presented their findings in a working paper called ” An Economic Analysis of Obesity ” for the National Bureau of Economic Research . In the paper, the economists note that… ______________________________________

So I Google An Economic Analysis of Obesity and find it’s REALLY:

An Economic Analysis of Adult Obesity: Results from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System Shin-Yi Chou, Michael Grossman and Henry Saffer NBER Working Paper No. 9247 October 2002 JEL No. I12, I18

The mis-cited, mis-cited :) statement is on page 28:

“Without trend terms, the increase in the per capita number of restaurants makes the largest contribution to trends in weight outcomes, accounting for 69 percent of the growth in BMI and 68 percent of the rise in the percentage obese.” (Chou 28)

So, first, kudos to you!!! – for even taking the time to fact-check the quote… If it wasn’t for you, I’d have been wrong, and wronger :)

Second, now that I have the correct citation information, do I

a) cite Banzhaf only, and b) with a [sic]?

The reason I ask is… I learned from you, elsewhere on your site, that I should not quote from an “outside source”… If I quote Chou’s paper, I’m thinking that is considered an “outside source”?

Wow. You blow my doors off with your attention to detail. Excellent, sir. Pure excellence.

Your own detective work was pretty good, too! Most professional researchers will put this level of scrutiny into every source they plan to use in their papers, which is why it’s worth the effort for students to find and use peer-reviewed academic sources, rather than random web pages.

If you want to use that statistic, I wouldn’t cite Banzhaf at all — which looked like a random website, not a scholarly publication. Just cite the MBER paper directly.

I just wanted to catch up and say thanks for your help.

I was (and still am) under a ton of deadlines, so I wasn’t able to stop back here right away…

FYI: The Banzhaf essay in question is in a textbook called: “They Say/I Say”: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing : With Readings. By Gerald Graff, Cathy Birkenstein, and Russel K. Durst. 1st ed. New York: W.W. Norton &, 2009. ISBN-13: 978-0393931747

The final was due within hours of my last post, so I had to make a corporate decision as to what(whom) I should cite…I picked Banzhaf. Citing him was easier than going with the MBER paper :)

I received a solid “B”. I kinda thought I was getting an A (hah! giggle…) When I read my professor’s critiques of my paper, however, she was deadly accurate as to what I needed to improve upon. It certainly was not an A paper, after all. So, I’ve got new goals for paper #2 :)

She made this very neat-o checklist of what constitutes A level work, B level work, C level work, etc… I’ll ask her permission to scan in and send to you…might be something cool to pass along.

An interesting anecdote: Discovering the mis-cited, mis-cited information in the Banzhaf essay/NYT article led me to my thesis topic for paper #2.

(I’m still trying to work out how I’m going to explain somewhere in that paper that ya’ got ta’ put da’ lime in de’ coconut… but it’ll come to me…)

Keep up the awesome work on helping all of us of out here in “the intertoobs” land… we, the unwashed masses of inept paper writers :) You rock!

How delightful to hear your update! If you are taking your learning this seriously, I don’t see how you can go wrong.

I love your website! I’m in a college English Comp class and am working on a thesis paper.

(MLA format)

I’m quoting an author named John Banzhaf and have a question about how to cite the quote.

My author’s essay is actually a transcript of his Congressional testimony. He uses footnotes to provide references to validate his statements.

In one of his footnotes, he quotes an excerpt from an article in the New York Times.

I’ve quoted that same NYT excerpt.

How would I format the quote citation?

Do I cite the quote as coming from the author’s body of work, and not worry about it’s original source?

I’m thinking it should be: (I’ve included my own lead-in, for your to see what I’m trying to quote)

…it is one of these footnotes that refers us to a study done by the National Bureau of Economic Statistics and subsequently reported in the New York Times that the “growth of fast-food accounted for 68 percent of the rise in American obesity”. (Banzhaf 166)

I asked my professor, and she wasn’t sure. MLA’s website doesn’t provide specific formatting help (buy the book :) and Purdue doesn’t mention a quote within a quote…

Thank you for any help!!! You are an ENORMOUS help to us literary n00bs :)

You’re playing the telephone game — I am reading what you say Banzhaf said the New York Times said something called the “National Bureau of Economic Statistics” said.

I just did a Google search, and I found a US Bureau of Economic Analysis and National Bureau of Economic Research. I don’t know anything about economics, so I don’t know whether perhaps the same organization had a recent name change, but it looks to me like Google references to NBES are actually talking about the NBER instead. At any rate, that’s enough of a warning sign that I’d say the problem is not how to cite Banzhaf, but rather how to trace the 68% statistic directly to its source. (I’d start by looking for the NYT article that Banzhaf mentions.)

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11.3: Smoothly Integrating Quotations

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WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO SMOOTHLY INTEGRATE QUOTATIONS?

When you are incorporating the direct language of others into your own writing, you want that integration to be fluid and seamless. You don’t want your reader to get lost or confused as you transition from your voice and ideas to another person’s. You want to use quotations in a way that clarify, support, and strengthen your writing.

WHY IS THIS IMPORTANT?

• Readers can better understand the relevance of smoothly integrated quotations.
• Readers can clearly see the connection between an integrated quotation and what it is trying to prove or illustrate.
• Readers can be better convinced by evidence presented in smoothly integrated quotations.
• Readers don’t experience being lost or frustrated by quotations that appear unrelated, inappropriate, or off topic.

HOW DO I SMOOTHLY INTEGRATE QUOTATIONS?

A dropped quote is a quote from someone else that is placed in your writing but it stands alone and is not introduced and not integrated into a sentence of your own. A dropped quote interrupts the flow of your writing, as the reader must jump abruptly from your words to someone else’s and back again. Also, if you’re not integrating direct quotations into your own writing, you’re probably not giving your reader the context they need to understand the quote.

Think of a quote as a helium balloon that needs an anchor to hold it down in your essay:

II. Connect quotes to phrases that introduce them.

Here are a few approaches for creating introductory phrases for quotes:

1) Identify the speaker and context of the quote

Example: Dee protests to her mother that her sister does not know the true value of the quilts, “Maggie can’t appreciate these quilts! She’d probably be backward enough to put them to everyday use” (Walker 490). 2) Lead in with your own idea

Example: Miss Emily Grierson’s house is a reflection of her being out of sync with the times: “But garages and cotton gins had encroached and obliterated even the august names of that neighborhood; only Miss Emily’s house was left, lifting its stubborn and coquettish decay above the cotton wagons and gasoline pumps—an eyesore among eyesores” (Faulkner 459).

3) Formulas

• In (title of source), (author) writes/ argues/ explains/ describes, "quote" (#).

Example: In I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings , Maya Angelou writes, "In Stamps the segregation was so complete that most Black children didn't really absolutely know what whites looked like" (20).

• According to (author) in (title), "quote" (#).

To avoid monotony, try to vary your formulas. The following models suggest a range of possibilities: In the words of researcher Herbert Terrace, “…” Jason Applegate, Smith’s trainer, points out, “…” “…,” claims linguist Noam Chomsky. Psychologist H.S. Terrace offers an odd argument for this view, “…”

Also, by choosing an appropriate verb , you can make your stance clear and the description more alive and engaging:

Practice: Integrating Quotes using introductory Phrases

For each quote below, create a sentence that smoothly integrates the quote. Try a few different methods: Method #1: Identify the speaker and context of the quote: Quote : "On this island, you walk too far and people speak a different language. Their own words reveal who belongs on what side" Background information : From The Farming of Bones by Edwidge Danticat, the speaker is Senora Valencia, page 304. Senora Valencia is referring to the island of Hispanola, which the countries of Haiti and the Dominican Republic share. She is speaking during the times that the dictator Trujillo had many Haitians murdered in and exiled from the Dominican Republic. Quote integrated into a sentence :

Method #2: Lead in with your own idea: Quote : "They did not have the tanates to go up north and break through the wall of electric fences and enter the land of plenty, the U.S. of A., a land so rich that what garbage they throw away in one day could feed entire pueblos." Background information : From Macho! By Victor Villasenor, page 31. The book tells the story of a young man named Roberto from Michoacán who risks himself to go north to California to work as an illegal alien picking fruit in California. Quote integrated into a sentence :

Method #3: Formula (try using a good and dynamic verb): Quote : "Racial targeting and abuse by police is costly. U.S. taxpayers have paid tens of millions of dollars in police brutality lawsuits. Between 1992 and 1993, Los Angeles county alone paid more than $30 million to citizens victimized by police brutality." Background information : From The Color of Crime by Katheryn K. Russell, page 45 who writes about the ways in which African-Americans are misrepresented by the media and mistreated within the criminal system. Quote integrated into a sentence :

Potential answers for INTEGRATING QUOTES USING INTRODUCTORY PHRASES EXERCISE

Method #1: Identify the speaker and context of the quote:

Senora Valencia describes the severe division that exists in her homeland of Hispanola due to Trujillo’s bloody dictatorship, "On this island, you walk too far and people speak a different language. Their own words reveal who belongs on what side” (Danticat 304).

Method #2: Lead in with your own idea:

Villasenor captures the decadence of the United States through the hungry eyes of Roberto, a young boy who risks going north to work illegally, "They did not have the tanates to go up north and break through the wall of electric fences and enter the land of plenty, the U.S. of A., a land so rich that what garbage they throw away in one day could feed entire pueblos” (31).

Method #3: Formula (try using a good and dynamic verb):

In The Color of Crime , Katheryn K. Russell exposes: "Racial targeting and abuse by police is costly. U.S. taxpayers have paid tens of millions of dollars in police brutality lawsuits. Between 1992 and 1993, Los Angeles county alone paid more than $30 million to citizens victimized by police brutality” (45).

III. Follow quotes with an explanation of their significance.

After the quote, provide your own reasoning and analysis explaining the significance and relevance of the quote.

Here are a few approaches to ensure the inclusion of analysis and significance for the quotes you select:

APPROACH 1: SAY, MEAN, MATTER?

“Say, Mean, Matter” is a 3-step approach to select good quotes, understand them, and then analyze them.

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• How to Quote | Citing Quotes in Harvard & APA

How to Quote | Citing Quotes in Harvard & APA

Published on 15 April 2022 by Shona McCombes and Jack Caulfield. Revised on 3 September 2022.

Quoting means copying a passage of someone else’s words and crediting the source. To quote a source, you must ensure:

• The quoted text is enclosed in quotation marks (usually single quotation marks in UK English, though double is acceptable as long as you’re consistent) or formatted as a block quote
• The original author is correctly cited
• The text is identical to the original

The exact format of a quote depends on its length and on which citation style you are using. Quoting and citing correctly is essential to avoid plagiarism , which is easy to detect with a good plagiarism checker .

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Table of contents

How to cite a quote in harvard and apa style, introducing quotes, quotes within quotes, shortening or altering a quote, block quotes, when should i use quotes, frequently asked questions about quoting sources.

Every time you quote, you must cite the source correctly . This looks slightly different depending on the citation style you’re using.

Citing a quote in Harvard style

When you include a quote in Harvard style, you must add a Harvard in-text citation giving the author’s last name, the year of publication, and a page number if available. Any full stop or comma appears after the citation, not within the quotation marks.

Citations can be parenthetical or narrative. In a parenthetical citation , you place all the information in brackets after the quote. In a narrative citation , you name the author in your sentence (followed by the year), and place the page number after the quote.

• Evolution is a gradual process that ‘can act only by very short and slow steps’ (Darwin, 1859, p. 510) . Darwin (1859) explains that evolution ‘can act only by very short and slow steps’ (p. 510) .

Complete guide to Harvard style

Citing a quote in APA Style

To cite a direct quote in APA , you must include the author’s last name, the year, and a page number, all separated by commas. If the quote appears on a single page, use ‘p.’; if it spans a page range, use ‘pp.’

An APA in-text citation can be parenthetical or narrative. In a parenthetical citation , you place all the information in parentheses after the quote. In a narrative citation , you name the author in your sentence (followed by the year), and place the page number after the quote.

Punctuation marks such as full stops and commas are placed after the citation, not within the quotation marks.

• Evolution is a gradual process that ‘can act only by very short and slow steps’ (Darwin, 1859, p. 510) .
• Darwin (1859) explains that evolution ‘can act only by very short and slow steps’ (p. 510) .

Complete guide to APA

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Make sure you integrate quotes properly into your text by introducing them in your own words, showing the reader why you’re including the quote and providing any context necessary to understand it.  Don’t  present quotations as stand-alone sentences.

There are three main strategies you can use to introduce quotes in a grammatically correct way:

• Add an introductory sentence
• Use an introductory signal phrase
• Integrate the quote into your own sentence

The following examples use APA Style citations, but these strategies can be used in all styles.

Introductory sentence

Introduce the quote with a full sentence ending in a colon . Don’t use a colon if the text before the quote isn’t a full sentence.

If you name the author in your sentence, you may use present-tense verbs, such as “states’, ‘argues’, ‘explains’, ‘writes’, or ‘reports’, to describe the content of the quote.

• In Denmark, a recent poll shows that: ‘A membership referendum held today would be backed by 55 percent of Danish voters’ (Levring, 2018, p. 3).
• In Denmark, a recent poll shows that support for the EU has grown since the Brexit vote: ‘A membership referendum held today would be backed by 55 percent of Danish voters’ (Levring, 2018, p. 3).
• Levring (2018) reports that support for the EU has grown since the Brexit vote: ‘A membership referendum held today would be backed by 55 percent of Danish voters’ (p. 3).

Introductory signal phrase

You can also use a signal phrase that mentions the author or source but doesn’t form a full sentence. In this case, you follow the phrase with a comma instead of a colon.

• According to a recent poll, ‘A membership referendum held today would be backed by 55 percent of Danish voters’ (Levring, 2018, p. 3).
• As Levring (2018) explains, ‘A membership referendum held today would be backed by 55 percent of Danish voters’ (p. 3).

Integrated into your own sentence

To quote a phrase that doesn’t form a full sentence, you can also integrate it as part of your sentence, without any extra punctuation.

• A recent poll suggests that EU membership ‘would be backed by 55 percent of Danish voters’ in a referendum (Levring, 2018, p. 3).
• Levring (2018) reports that EU membership ‘would be backed by 55 percent of Danish voters’ in a referendum (p. 3).

When you quote text that itself contains another quote, this is called a nested quotation or a quote within a quote. It may occur, for example, when quoting dialogue from a novel.

To distinguish this quote from the surrounding quote, you enclose it in double (instead of single) quotation marks (even if this involves changing the punctuation from the original text). Make sure to close both sets of quotation marks at the appropriate moments.

Note that if you only quote the nested quotation itself, and not the surrounding text, you can just use single quotation marks.

• Carraway introduces his narrative by quoting his father: ‘ ‘ Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone, ‘ he told me, ‘ just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had ‘ ‘ (Fitzgerald 1).
• Carraway introduces his narrative by quoting his father: ‘”Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had “  (Fitzgerald 1).
• Carraway introduces his narrative by quoting his father: ‘“Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had”’ (Fitzgerald 1).
• Carraway begins by quoting his father’s invocation to ‘remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had’ (Fitzgerald 1).

Note:  When the quoted text in the source comes from another source, it’s best to just find that original source in order to quote it directly. If you can’t find the original source, you can instead cite it indirectly .

Often, incorporating a quote smoothly into your text requires you to make some changes to the original text. It’s fine to do this, as long as you clearly mark the changes you’ve made to the quote.

Shortening a quote

If some parts of a passage are redundant or irrelevant, you can shorten the quote by removing words, phrases, or sentences and replacing them with an ellipsis (…). Put a space before and after the ellipsis.

Be careful that removing the words doesn’t change the meaning. The ellipsis indicates that some text has been removed, but the shortened quote should still accurately represent the author’s point.

Altering a quote

You can add or replace words in a quote when necessary. This might be because the original text doesn’t fit grammatically with your sentence (e.g., it’s in a different tense), or because extra information is needed to clarify the quote’s meaning.

Use brackets to distinguish words that you have added from words that were present in the original text.

The Latin term ‘ sic ‘ is used to indicate a (factual or grammatical) mistake in a quotation. It shows the reader that the mistake is from the quoted material, not a typo of your own.

In some cases, it can be useful to italicise part of a quotation to add emphasis, showing the reader that this is the key part to pay attention to. Use the phrase ’emphasis added’ to show that the italics were not part of the original text.

You usually don’t need to use brackets to indicate minor changes to punctuation or capitalisation made to ensure the quote fits the style of your text.

If you quote more than a few lines from a source, you must format it as a block quote . Instead of using quotation marks, you set the quote on a new line and indent it so that it forms a separate block of text.

Block quotes are cited just like regular quotes, except that if the quote ends with a full stop, the citation appears after the full stop.

To the end of his days Bilbo could never remember how he found himself outside, without a hat, a walking-stick or any money, or anything that he usually took when he went out; leaving his second breakfast half-finished and quite unwashed-up, pushing his keys into Gandalf’s hands, and running as fast as his furry feet could carry him down the lane, past the great Mill, across The Water, and then on for a mile or more. (16)

Avoid relying too heavily on quotes in academic writing . To integrate a source , it’s often best to paraphrase , which means putting the passage into your own words. This helps you integrate information smoothly and keeps your own voice dominant.

However, there are some situations in which quotes are more appropriate.

When focusing on language

If you want to comment on how the author uses language (for example, in literary analysis ), it’s necessary to quote so that the reader can see the exact passage you are referring to.

When giving evidence

To convince the reader of your argument, interpretation or position on a topic, it’s often helpful to include quotes that support your point. Quotes from primary sources (for example, interview transcripts or historical documents) are especially credible as evidence.

When presenting an author’s position or definition

When you’re referring to secondary sources such as scholarly books and journal articles, try to put others’ ideas in your own words when possible.

But if a passage does a great job at expressing, explaining, or defining something, and it would be very difficult to paraphrase without changing the meaning or losing the weakening the idea’s impact, it’s worth quoting directly.

A quote is an exact copy of someone else’s words, usually enclosed in quotation marks and credited to the original author or speaker.

To present information from other sources in academic writing , it’s best to paraphrase in most cases. This shows that you’ve understood the ideas you’re discussing and incorporates them into your text smoothly.

It’s appropriate to quote when:

• Changing the phrasing would distort the meaning of the original text
• You want to discuss the author’s language choices (e.g., in literary analysis )
• You’re presenting a precise definition
• You’re looking in depth at a specific claim

Every time you quote a source , you must include a correctly formatted in-text citation . This looks slightly different depending on the citation style .

For example, a direct quote in APA is cited like this: ‘This is a quote’ (Streefkerk, 2020, p. 5).

Every in-text citation should also correspond to a full reference at the end of your paper.

In scientific subjects, the information itself is more important than how it was expressed, so quoting should generally be kept to a minimum. In the arts and humanities, however, well-chosen quotes are often essential to a good paper.

In social sciences, it varies. If your research is mainly quantitative , you won’t include many quotes, but if it’s more qualitative , you may need to quote from the data you collected .

As a general guideline, quotes should take up no more than 5–10% of your paper. If in doubt, check with your instructor or supervisor how much quoting is appropriate in your field.

If you’re quoting from a text that paraphrases or summarises other sources and cites them in parentheses , APA  recommends retaining the citations as part of the quote:

• Smith states that ‘the literature on this topic (Jones, 2015; Sill, 2019; Paulson, 2020) shows no clear consensus’ (Smith, 2019, p. 4).

Footnote or endnote numbers that appear within quoted text should be omitted.

If you want to cite an indirect source (one you’ve only seen quoted in another source), either locate the original source or use the phrase ‘as cited in’ in your citation.

A block quote is a long quote formatted as a separate ‘block’ of text. Instead of using quotation marks , you place the quote on a new line, and indent the entire quote to mark it apart from your own words.

APA uses block quotes for quotes that are 40 words or longer.

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What this handout is about

Used effectively, quotations can provide important pieces of evidence and lend fresh voices and perspectives to your narrative. Used ineffectively, however, quotations can clutter your text and interrupt the flow of your argument. This handout will help you decide when and how to quote like a pro.

When should I quote?

Use quotations at strategically selected moments. You have probably been told by teachers to provide as much evidence as possible in support of your thesis. But packing your paper with quotations will not necessarily strengthen your argument. The majority of your paper should still be your original ideas in your own words (after all, it’s your paper). And quotations are only one type of evidence: well-balanced papers may also make use of paraphrases, data, and statistics. The types of evidence you use will depend in part on the conventions of the discipline or audience for which you are writing. For example, papers analyzing literature may rely heavily on direct quotations of the text, while papers in the social sciences may have more paraphrasing, data, and statistics than quotations.

Discussing specific arguments or ideas

Sometimes, in order to have a clear, accurate discussion of the ideas of others, you need to quote those ideas word for word. Suppose you want to challenge the following statement made by John Doe, a well-known historian:

“At the beginning of World War Two, almost all Americans assumed the war would end quickly.”

If it is especially important that you formulate a counterargument to this claim, then you might wish to quote the part of the statement that you find questionable and establish a dialogue between yourself and John Doe:

Historian John Doe has argued that in 1941 “almost all Americans assumed the war would end quickly” (Doe 223). Yet during the first six months of U.S. involvement, the wives and mothers of soldiers often noted in their diaries their fear that the war would drag on for years.

Giving added emphasis to a particularly authoritative source on your topic.

There will be times when you want to highlight the words of a particularly important and authoritative source on your topic. For example, suppose you were writing an essay about the differences between the lives of male and female slaves in the U.S. South. One of your most provocative sources is a narrative written by a former slave, Harriet Jacobs. It would then be appropriate to quote some of Jacobs’s words:

Harriet Jacobs, a former slave from North Carolina, published an autobiographical slave narrative in 1861. She exposed the hardships of both male and female slaves but ultimately concluded that “slavery is terrible for men; but it is far more terrible for women.”

In this particular example, Jacobs is providing a crucial first-hand perspective on slavery. Thus, her words deserve more exposure than a paraphrase could provide.

Jacobs is quoted in Harriet A. Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, ed. Jean Fagan Yellin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987).

Analyzing how others use language.

This scenario is probably most common in literature and linguistics courses, but you might also find yourself writing about the use of language in history and social science classes. If the use of language is your primary topic, then you will obviously need to quote users of that language.

Examples of topics that might require the frequent use of quotations include:

Southern colloquial expressions in William Faulkner’s Light in August

Ms. and the creation of a language of female empowerment

A comparison of three British poets and their use of rhyme

Spicing up your prose.

In order to lend variety to your prose, you may wish to quote a source with particularly vivid language. All quotations, however, must closely relate to your topic and arguments. Do not insert a quotation solely for its literary merits.

One example of a quotation that adds flair:

President Calvin Coolidge’s tendency to fall asleep became legendary. As H. L. Mencken commented in the American Mercury in 1933, “Nero fiddled, but Coolidge only snored.”

How do I set up and follow up a quotation?

Once you’ve carefully selected the quotations that you want to use, your next job is to weave those quotations into your text. The words that precede and follow a quotation are just as important as the quotation itself. You can think of each quote as the filling in a sandwich: it may be tasty on its own, but it’s messy to eat without some bread on either side of it. Your words can serve as the “bread” that helps readers digest each quote easily. Below are four guidelines for setting up and following up quotations.

In illustrating these four steps, we’ll use as our example, Franklin Roosevelt’s famous quotation, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

1. Provide context for each quotation.

Do not rely on quotations to tell your story for you. It is your responsibility to provide your reader with context for the quotation. The context should set the basic scene for when, possibly where, and under what circumstances the quotation was spoken or written. So, in providing context for our above example, you might write:

When Franklin Roosevelt gave his inaugural speech on March 4, 1933, he addressed a nation weakened and demoralized by economic depression.

2. Attribute each quotation to its source.

Tell your reader who is speaking. Here is a good test: try reading your text aloud. Could your reader determine without looking at your paper where your quotations begin? If not, you need to attribute the quote more noticeably.

Avoid getting into the “they said” attribution rut! There are many other ways to attribute quotes besides this construction. Here are a few alternative verbs, usually followed by “that”:

Different reporting verbs are preferred by different disciplines, so pay special attention to these in your disciplinary reading. If you’re unfamiliar with the meanings of any of these words or others you find in your reading, consult a dictionary before using them.

3. Explain the significance of the quotation.

Once you’ve inserted your quotation, along with its context and attribution, don’t stop! Your reader still needs your assessment of why the quotation holds significance for your paper. Using our Roosevelt example, if you were writing a paper on the first one-hundred days of FDR’s administration, you might follow the quotation by linking it to that topic:

With that message of hope and confidence, the new president set the stage for his next one-hundred days in office and helped restore the faith of the American people in their government.

4. Provide a citation for the quotation.

All quotations, just like all paraphrases, require a formal citation. For more details about particular citation formats, see the UNC Libraries citation tutorial . In general, you should remember one rule of thumb: Place the parenthetical reference or footnote/endnote number after—not within—the closed quotation mark.

Roosevelt declared, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself” (Roosevelt, Public Papers, 11).

Roosevelt declared, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”1

How do I embed a quotation into a sentence?

In general, avoid leaving quotes as sentences unto themselves. Even if you have provided some context for the quote, a quote standing alone can disrupt your flow.  Take a look at this example:

Hamlet denies Rosencrantz’s claim that thwarted ambition caused his depression. “I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space” (Hamlet 2.2).

Standing by itself, the quote’s connection to the preceding sentence is unclear. There are several ways to incorporate a quote more smoothly:

Lead into the quote with a colon.

Hamlet denies Rosencrantz’s claim that thwarted ambition caused his depression: “I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space” (Hamlet 2.2).

The colon announces that a quote will follow to provide evidence for the sentence’s claim.

Introduce or conclude the quote by attributing it to the speaker. If your attribution precedes the quote, you will need to use a comma after the verb.

Hamlet denies Rosencrantz’s claim that thwarted ambition caused his depression. He states, “I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space” (Hamlet 2.2).

When faced with a twelve-foot mountain troll, Ron gathers his courage, shouting, “Wingardium Leviosa!” (Rowling, p. 176).

The Pirate King sees an element of regality in their impoverished and dishonest life. “It is, it is a glorious thing/To be a pirate king,” he declares (Pirates of Penzance, 1983).

Interrupt the quote with an attribution to the speaker. Again, you will need to use a comma after the verb, as well as a comma leading into the attribution.

“There is nothing either good or bad,” Hamlet argues, “but thinking makes it so” (Hamlet 2.2).

“And death shall be no more,” Donne writes, “Death thou shalt die” (“Death, Be Not Proud,” l. 14).

Dividing the quote may highlight a particular nuance of the quote’s meaning. In the first example, the division calls attention to the two parts of Hamlet’s claim. The first phrase states that nothing is inherently good or bad; the second phrase suggests that our perspective causes things to become good or bad. In the second example, the isolation of “Death thou shalt die” at the end of the sentence draws a reader’s attention to that phrase in particular. As you decide whether or not you want to break up a quote, you should consider the shift in emphasis that the division might create.

Use the words of the quote grammatically within your own sentence.

When Hamlet tells Rosencrantz that he “could be bounded in a nutshell and count [him]self a king of infinite space” (Hamlet 2.2), he implies that thwarted ambition did not cause his depression.

Ultimately, death holds no power over Donne since in the afterlife, “death shall be no more” (“Death, Be Not Proud,” l. 14).

Note that when you use “that” after the verb that introduces the quote, you no longer need a comma.

The Pirate King argues that “it is, it is a glorious thing/to be a pirate king” (Pirates of Penzance, 1983).

How much should I quote?

As few words as possible. Remember, your paper should primarily contain your own words, so quote only the most pithy and memorable parts of sources. Here are guidelines for selecting quoted material judiciously:

Excerpt fragments.

Sometimes, you should quote short fragments, rather than whole sentences. Suppose you interviewed Jane Doe about her reaction to John F. Kennedy’s assassination. She commented:

“I couldn’t believe it. It was just unreal and so sad. It was just unbelievable. I had never experienced such denial. I don’t know why I felt so strongly. Perhaps it was because JFK was more to me than a president. He represented the hopes of young people everywhere.”

You could quote all of Jane’s comments, but her first three sentences are fairly redundant. You might instead want to quote Jane when she arrives at the ultimate reason for her strong emotions:

Jane Doe grappled with grief and disbelief. She had viewed JFK, not just as a national figurehead, but as someone who “represented the hopes of young people everywhere.”

Excerpt those fragments carefully!

Quoting the words of others carries a big responsibility. Misquoting misrepresents the ideas of others. Here’s a classic example of a misquote:

John Adams has often been quoted as having said: “This would be the best of all possible worlds if there were no religion in it.”

John Adams did, in fact, write the above words. But if you see those words in context, the meaning changes entirely. Here’s the rest of the quotation:

Twenty times, in the course of my late reading, have I been on the point of breaking out, ‘this would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it!!!!’ But in this exclamation, I should have been as fanatical as Bryant or Cleverly. Without religion, this world would be something not fit to be mentioned in public company—I mean hell.

As you can see from this example, context matters!

This example is from Paul F. Boller, Jr. and John George, They Never Said It: A Book of Fake Quotes, Misquotes, and Misleading Attributions (Oxford University Press, 1989).

Use block quotations sparingly.

There may be times when you need to quote long passages. However, you should use block quotations only when you fear that omitting any words will destroy the integrity of the passage. If that passage exceeds four lines (some sources say five), then set it off as a block quotation.

Be sure you are handling block quotes correctly in papers for different academic disciplines–check the index of the citation style guide you are using. Here are a few general tips for setting off your block quotations:

• Set up a block quotation with your own words followed by a colon.
• Indent. You normally indent 4-5 spaces for the start of a paragraph. When setting up a block quotation, indent the entire paragraph once from the left-hand margin.
• Single space or double space within the block quotation, depending on the style guidelines of your discipline (MLA, CSE, APA, Chicago, etc.).
• Do not use quotation marks at the beginning or end of the block quote—the indentation is what indicates that it’s a quote.
• Place parenthetical citation according to your style guide (usually after the period following the last sentence of the quote).
• Follow up a block quotation with your own words.

So, using the above example from John Adams, here’s how you might include a block quotation:

After reading several doctrinally rigid tracts, John Adams recalled the zealous ranting of his former teacher, Joseph Cleverly, and minister, Lemuel Bryant. He expressed his ambivalence toward religion in an 1817 letter to Thomas Jefferson:

Adams clearly appreciated religion, even if he often questioned its promotion.

How do I combine quotation marks with other punctuation marks?

It can be confusing when you start combining quotation marks with other punctuation marks. You should consult a style manual for complicated situations, but the following two rules apply to most cases:

Keep periods and commas within quotation marks.

So, for example:

According to Professor Poe, werewolves “represent anxiety about the separation between human and animal,” and werewolf movies often “interrogate those boundaries.”

In the above example, both the comma and period were enclosed in the quotation marks. The main exception to this rule involves the use of internal citations, which always precede the last period of the sentence. For example:

According to Professor Poe, werewolves “represent anxiety about the separation between human and animal,” and werewolf movies often “interrogate those boundaries” (Poe 167).

Note, however, that the period remains inside the quotation marks when your citation style involves superscript footnotes or endnotes. For example:

According to Professor Poe, werewolves “represent anxiety about the separation between human and animal,” and werewolf movies often “interrogate those boundaries.” 2

Place all other punctuation marks (colons, semicolons, exclamation marks, question marks) outside the quotation marks, except when they were part of the original quotation.

Take a look at the following examples:

I couldn’t believe it when my friend passed me a note in the cafe saying the management “started charging $15 per hour for parking”!

The coach yelled, “Run!”

In the first example, the author placed the exclamation point outside the quotation mark because she added it herself to emphasize the outrageous nature of the parking price change. The original note had not included an exclamation mark. In the second example, the exclamation mark remains within the quotation mark because it is indicating the excited tone in which the coach yelled the command. Thus, the exclamation mark is considered to be part of the original quotation.

How do I indicate quotations within quotations?

If you are quoting a passage that contains a quotation, then you use single quotation marks for the internal quotation. Quite rarely, you quote a passage that has a quotation within a quotation. In that rare instance, you would use double quotation marks for the second internal quotation.

Here’s an example of a quotation within a quotation:

In “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” Hans Christian Andersen wrote, “‘But the Emperor has nothing on at all!’ cried a little child.”

Remember to consult your style guide to determine how to properly cite a quote within a quote.

When do I use those three dots ( . . . )?

Whenever you want to leave out material from within a quotation, you need to use an ellipsis, which is a series of three periods, each of which should be preceded and followed by a space. So, an ellipsis in this sentence would look like . . . this. There are a few rules to follow when using ellipses:

Be sure that you don’t fundamentally change the meaning of the quotation by omitting material.

Take a look at the following example:

“The Writing Center is located on the UNC campus and serves the entire UNC community.”

“The Writing Center . . . serves the entire UNC community.”

The reader’s understanding of the Writing Center’s mission to serve the UNC community is not affected by omitting the information about its location.

Do not use ellipses at the beginning or ending of quotations, unless it’s important for the reader to know that the quotation was truncated.

For example, using the above example, you would NOT need an ellipsis in either of these situations:

“The Writing Center is located on the UNC campus . . .”

The Writing Center ” . . . serves the entire UNC community.”

Use punctuation marks in combination with ellipses when removing material from the end of sentences or clauses.

For example, if you take material from the end of a sentence, keep the period in as usual.

“The boys ran to school, forgetting their lunches and books. Even though they were out of breath, they made it on time.”

“The boys ran to school. . . . Even though they were out of breath, they made it on time.”

Likewise, if you excerpt material at the end of clause that ends in a comma, retain the comma.

“The red car came to a screeching halt that was heard by nearby pedestrians, but no one was hurt.”

“The red car came to a screeching halt . . . , but no one was hurt.”

Is it ever okay to insert my own words or change words in a quotation?

Sometimes it is necessary for clarity and flow to alter a word or words within a quotation. You should make such changes rarely. In order to alert your reader to the changes you’ve made, you should always bracket the altered words. Here are a few examples of situations when you might need brackets:

Changing verb tense or pronouns in order to be consistent with the rest of the sentence.

Suppose you were quoting a woman who, when asked about her experiences immigrating to the United States, commented “nobody understood me.” You might write:

Esther Hansen felt that when she came to the United States “nobody understood [her].”

In the above example, you’ve changed “me” to “her” in order to keep the entire passage in third person. However, you could avoid the need for this change by simply rephrasing:

“Nobody understood me,” recalled Danish immigrant Esther Hansen.

Including supplemental information that your reader needs in order to understand the quotation.

For example, if you were quoting someone’s nickname, you might want to let your reader know the full name of that person in brackets.

“The principal of the school told Billy [William Smith] that his contract would be terminated.”

Similarly, if a quotation referenced an event with which the reader might be unfamiliar, you could identify that event in brackets.

“We completely revised our political strategies after the strike [of 1934].”

Indicating the use of nonstandard grammar or spelling.

In rare situations, you may quote from a text that has nonstandard grammar, spelling, or word choice. In such cases, you may want to insert [sic], which means “thus” or “so” in Latin. Using [sic] alerts your reader to the fact that this nonstandard language is not the result of a typo on your part. Always italicize “sic” and enclose it in brackets. There is no need to put a period at the end. Here’s an example of when you might use [sic]:

Twelve-year-old Betsy Smith wrote in her diary, “Father is afraid that he will be guilty of beach [sic] of contract.”

Here [sic] indicates that the original author wrote “beach of contract,” not breach of contract, which is the accepted terminology.

Do not overuse brackets!

For example, it is not necessary to bracket capitalization changes that you make at the beginning of sentences. For example, suppose you were going to use part of this quotation:

“The colors scintillated curiously over a hard carapace, and the beetle’s tiny antennae made gentle waving motions as though saying hello.”

If you wanted to begin a sentence with an excerpt from the middle of this quotation, there would be no need to bracket your capitalization changes.

“The beetle’s tiny antennae made gentle waving motions as though saying hello,” said Dr. Grace Farley, remembering a defining moment on her journey to becoming an entomologist.

Not: “[T]he beetle’s tiny antennae made gentle waving motions as though saying hello,” said Dr. Grace Farley, remembering a defining moment on her journey to becoming an entomologist.

Works consulted

We consulted these works while writing this handout. This is not a comprehensive list of resources on the handout’s topic, and we encourage you to do your own research to find additional publications. Please do not use this list as a model for the format of your own reference list, as it may not match the citation style you are using. For guidance on formatting citations, please see the UNC Libraries citation tutorial . We revise these tips periodically and welcome feedback.

Barzun, Jacques, and Henry F. Graff. 2012. The Modern Researcher , 6th ed. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Cengage Learning.

Booth, Wayne C., Gregory G. Colomb, Joseph M. Williams, Joseph Bizup, and William T. FitzGerald. 2016. The Craft of Research , 4th ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Gibaldi, Joseph. 2009. MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers , 7th ed. New York: The Modern Language Association of America.

Turabian, Kate. 2018. A Manual for Writers of Term Papers, Theses, Dissertations , 9th ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

You may reproduce it for non-commercial use if you use the entire handout and attribute the source: The Writing Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

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• v.8(6); 2019 Dec

Beyond the default colon: Effective use of quotes in qualitative research

Lorelei lingard.

Centre for Education Research & Innovation and Department of Medicine, Health Sciences Addition, Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry, Western University, London, Canada

In the Writer’s Craft section we offer simple tips to improve your writing in one of three areas: Energy, Clarity and Persuasiveness. Each entry focuses on a key writing feature or strategy, illustrates how it commonly goes wrong, teaches the grammatical underpinnings necessary to understand it and offers suggestions to wield it effectively. We encourage readers to share comments on or suggestions for this section on Twitter, using the hashtag: #how’syourwriting?

Last week the ‘e’ key died on my laptop. It’s a first-world problem, I’ll admit, but it really threw my writing for a loop—a lot of words require an ‘e’ key. Reflecting on what other keys I could not do without, I made a quick shortlist: comma, ‘ly’ and colon. The comma because its absence would consign me to the sort of breathy, adolescent writing that fills social media. The ‘ly’ because without that duo I can’t make most of the adverbs that prop up my first drafts. And the colon because I’m a qualitative researcher. How would I introduce quotes if the colon key were out of order?

I’m only partly joking. Every qualitative researcher confronts the challenge of selecting the right quotes and integrating them effectively into their manuscripts. As writers, we are all guilty of resorting to the default colon as an easy way to tuck quotes into our sentences; as readers, we have all suffered through papers that read like a laundry list of quotes rather than a story about what the writer learned. This Writer’s Craft instalment offers suggestions to help you choose the right quotes and integrate them with coherence and style, following the principles of authenticity and argument.

Authenticity

At the point of manuscript writing, a qualitative researcher is swimming in a sea of data. Innumerable transcript excerpts have been copied and pasted into data analysis software or (for the more tactile among us) onto multi-coloured sticky notes. Some of these excerpts we like very much. However, very few of them will make it into the final manuscript, particularly if we are writing for publication in a health research or medical education journal, with their 3000–4000 word limits.

Selecting the best quotes from among these cherished excerpts is harder than it looks. We should be guided by the principle of authenticity: does the quote offer readers first hand access to dominant patterns in the data? There are three parts to selecting a good, authentic quote: the quote is illustrative of the point the writer is making about the data, it is reasonably succinct, and it is representative of the patterns in data. Consider this quote, introduced with a short phrase to orient the reader:

Rather than feeling they were changing identities as they went through their training, medical students described the experience of accumulating and reconciling multiple identities: ‘the “life me”, who I was when I started this, is still here, but now there’s also, like, a “scientific me” as well as a sort of “doctor me”. And I’m trying to be all of that’ (S15) .

This quote is illustrative, providing an explicit example of the point that student identity is multiplying as training unfolds. It is succinct, expressing efficiently what other participants took pages to describe. And it is representative, remaining faithful to the overall sentiments of the many participants reporting this idea.

We have all read—and written!—drafts in which the quoted material does not reflect these characteristics. The remainder of this section addresses these recurring problems.

Is the quote illustrative?

A common challenge is the quote that illustrates the writer’s point implicitly, but not explicitly. Consider this example:

Medical students are undergoing a process of identity-negotiation: we’re ‘learning so much all the time, and some of it is the science stuff and some of it is professional or, like, practical ethical things, and we have to figure all that out’ (S2).

For this quote to serve as evidence for the point of identity-negotiation, the reader must infer that ‘figure all that out’ is a reference to this process. But readers may read their own meaning into decontextualized transcript extracts. Explicit is better, even if it sacrifices succinctness. In fact, this is the right quote, but we had trimmed away the first three sentences where ‘figuring out identity’ got explicit mention. The quote could be lengthened to include these sentences, or, to preserve succinctness, just that quoted phrase can be inserted into the introduction to the quote:

Medical students are ‘figuring out identity’, a process of negotiation in which they are ‘learning so much all the time, and some of it is the science stuff and some of it is professional or, like, practical ethical things, and we have to figure all that out’ (S2).

Is the quote succinct?

Interview transcripts are characterized by meandering and elliptical or incomplete speech. Therefore, you can search diligently and still come up with a 200-word quote to illustrate your 10-word point. Sometimes the long quote is perfect and you should include it. Often, however, you need to tighten it up. By including succinctness as part of the authenticity principle, my aim is to remind writers to explicitly consider whether their tightening up retains the gist of the quote.

The previous example illustrates one tightening technique: extract key phrases and integrate them into your own, introductory sentence to the quote. Another solution is to use the ellipsis to signal that you have cut part of the quote out:

Identity formation in the clinical environment is also influenced by materials and tools, ‘all this stuff you’ve never used before … you don’t know where it is or how to use it, and don’t even get me started on the computerized record. … So many hours and I’m still confused, am I ever going to know where to enter things?’ (S7) .

The first ellipsis signals that something mid-sentence has been removed. In this case, this missing material was an elaboration of ‘all this stuff’ that mentioned other details not relevant to the point being made. The second ellipsis follows a period, and therefore signals that at least one sentence has been removed and perhaps more. When using an ellipsis, only remove material that is irrelevant to the meaning of the quote, not relevant material that importantly nuances the meaning of the quote. The goal is not a bricolage which cuts and pastes tiny bits so that participants say what you want them to; it is a succinct-enough representation that remains faithful to the participant’s intended meaning.

Changing the wording of a quotation always risks violating the authenticity principle, so writers must do it thoughtfully. Two other situations, however, may call for this approach: to maintain the grammatical integrity of your sentence and to tidy up oral speech 1 . The first is usually not problematic, particularly if you are altering for consistent tense or for agreement of verb and subject or pronoun and antecedent, or replacing a pronoun with its referent. Square brackets signal such changes:

Participants from the community hospital setting, however, ‘[challenged] the assumption of anonymity when evaluating teachers’. (verb tense changed from present to past)

The second situation can be trickier: when should you tidy up the messiness of conversational discourse? Interview transcripts are replete with what linguists refer to as ‘fillers’ or ‘hesitation markers’, sounds and words such as ‘ah/uh/um/like/you know/right’ [ 1 ]. There is general agreement among qualitative scholars that quotes should be presented verbatim as much as possible, and those engaged in discourse and narrative analysis will necessarily analyze such hesitations as part of the meaning. In other applied social research methodologies, however, writers might do some ‘light tidying up’ both for readability and for ethical reasons, as long as they do not undermine authenticity in doing so [ 2 ]. Ethical issues include the desire not to do a disservice to participants by representing the um’s and ah’s of their natural speech, and the concern to protect participant anonymity by removing identifiable linguistic features such as regional or accented speech.

Finally, an emerging strategy for succinctness is to put the quotes into a table. Many qualitative researchers resent the constraints of the table format as an incursion from the quantitative realm. However, used thoughtfully, it can offer a means of presenting complex results efficiently. In this example, Goldszmidt et al. name, define and illustrate five main types of supervisor interruptions that they observed during their study of case review on internal medicine teaching teams (Tab.  1 ; [ 3 ]).

Types of supervisors’ interruptions during patient case review presentations, London Health Sciences Centre, University Hospital, Ontario, Canada 2010

AM  indicates morning case presentation; PM  overnight case presentation; A  attending physician; SR  senior resident; IM1  first-year internal medicine resident; FM1  first-year family medicine resident; CC  clinical clerk

This is a nice example of how ‘Tab.  1 ’, conventionally used in quantitative research papers for demographic details of the research sample, can be re-conceptualized to feature the key findings from a qualitative analysis. Tables should be supplemented, however, with narrative explanation in which the writer contextualizes and interprets the quoted material. More on this in the section on Argument.

Is the quote representative?

We have all been tempted to include the highly provocative quote (that thing we cannot believe someone said on tape), only to realize by the third draft that it misrepresents the data and must be relinquished. Quote selection should reflect strong patterns in the data; while discrepant examples serve an important purpose, their use should be purposeful and explicit. Your quote selection should also be distributed across participants, in order that you represent the data set. This may mean using the second- or third-best example rather than continuing to quote the same one or two highly articulate individuals.

You must provide sufficient context that readers can accurately infer the meaning of the quote. Sometimes this means including the interviewer’s question as well as the participant’s answer. In focus group research, where the emphasis is on the group discussion, it might be necessary to quote an exchange among participants rather than extracting individual comments. This example illustrates this technique:

Interviewer: And, in your experience, how do the students respond to your feedback about how well they communicated? SP1: Oh, really well, it’s really important to the students, they listen to what we say about their performance— Interruption with overlapping talk SP4: Well, yeah, on a good day maybe, sure. But not every time. Lots of sessions I feel like we’re probably more like props to them, so how well we think they did, I’m not sure that matters. SP3: Don’t you find it depends on the student? (FG2)

Of course, such a long excerpt threatens the goal of succinctness. Alternatively, you could use multiple quotes from this excerpt in a single sentence of your own:

Some standardized patients in the group believed that their assessor role was ‘really important to the students, they listen to what we say about their performance’, while others argued that ‘we’re probably more like props to them, so how well we think they did, I’m not sure that matters’. (FG2)

Sometimes a quote is representative but also, therefore, identifiable, jeopardizing confidentiality:

One participant explained that, ‘as chair of the competency committee, I prioritize how we spend our time. So that we can pay sufficient attention to this 2nd year resident. She’s supposed to be back from maternity leave but she had complications so her rotations need some altering for her to manage.’ (CCC4, P2)

In this case, the convention of using a legend (Clinical Competency Committee 4, participant 2) to attribute the quote may be insufficient to protect anonymity. If the study involves few programs and the methods identify them (e.g., Paediatrics and Medicine) and name the institution (e.g., Western University), the speaker may be identifiable to some readers, as may the resident.

Quoted material does not stand on its own: we must incorporate it into our texts, both grammatically and rhetorically. Grammatical incorporation is relatively straightforward, with one main rule to keep in mind: quoted material is subject to the same sentence-level conventions for grammar and punctuation as non-quoted material. Read this example aloud:

Arts and humanities teaching offers an opportunity for faculty to connect with medical students on a different level, ‘we can share how we feel about the work of caring, what it costs us, how it rewards us, as human beings’ (F9).

Your ear likely hears that this should be two sentences. But quotation marks seem to distract us from this, and we create a run-on sentence by putting a comma between the sentences. An easy correction is to replace the comma with a colon.

Arts and humanities teaching offers an opportunity for faculty to connect with medical students on a different level: ‘we can share how we feel about the work of caring, what it costs us, how it rewards us, as human beings’ (F9).

Many writers rely on the colon as their default mechanism for integrating quoted material. However, while it is often grammatically accurate, it is not always rhetorically sufficient. That is, the colon doesn’t contextualize, it doesn’t interpret. Instead, it ‘drops’ the quote in and leaves the reader to infer how the quoted material illustrates or advances the argument. This is problematic because it does not fulfil the requirement for adequacy of interpretation in presenting qualitative results. As Morrow argues, writers should aim for a balance of their interpretations and supporting quotations: ‘an overemphasis on the researcher’s interpretations at the cost of participant quotes will leave the reader in doubt as to just where the interpretations came from; an excess of quotes will cause the reader to become lost in the morass of stories’ [ 4 ]. (p. 256).

There are many techniques for achieving this balance between researcher interpretations and supporting quotations. Some techniques retain the default colon but attend carefully to the material that precedes it. Consider the following examples:

One clinician said: ‘Entrustment isn’t a decision, it’s a relationship’. (F21) One clinician argued: ‘Entrustment isn’t a decision, it’s a relationship’. (F21) One clinician in the focus group disagreed with the idea that entrustment was about deciding trainee progress: ‘Entrustment isn’t a decision, it’s a relationship’. (F21) Focus group participants debated the meaning of entrustment. Many described it matter-of-factly as ‘the process we use to decide whether the trainee should progress’, while a few argued that ‘entrustment isn’t a decision, it’s a relationship’. (F21)

These examples offer progressively more contextualization for the quote. The first example simply drops the quote in following the nondescript verb, ‘said’, offering no interpretive gloss and therefore exerting minimal rhetorical control over the reader. The second offers some context via the verb ‘argued’, which interprets the participant’s positioning or tone. The third interprets the meaning of the quote even more by situating it in the context of a focus group debate. And the fourth eschews the default colon entirely, integrating two quotes into the narrative structure of the author’s sentence to illustrate the dominant and the discrepant positions on entrustment in this focus group debate.

Integrating quotes into the narrative structure of your sentence, like the last example, offers two advantages to the writer. First, it interprets the quote for the reader and therefore exerts strong rhetorical control over the quote’s meaning. Second, it offers variety and style. If your goal is compelling prose, variety and style should not be underestimated. We have all had the experience of reading Results sections that proceed robotically: point-colon-quote, point-colon-quote, point-colon-quote …. If only to make the reader’s experience more enjoyable, your revision process should involve converting some of these to integrated narration.

Notwithstanding the goal of succinctness, sometimes you will include a longer quote because it beautifully illustrates the point. However, a long quote may offer opportunities for readers to focus on images or phrases other than those you intended, therefore creating incoherence in the argument you are making about your results. To guard against this, you might try the ‘quotation sandwich’ technique [ 5 ] of both an introductory phrase that sets up the context of the quote and a summary statement following it emphasizing why you consider it important and what you are using it to illustrate.

Finally, how many quotes do you need to support your point? More is not necessarily better. One quote should be sufficient to illustrate your point. Some points in your argument may not require a quoted excerpt at all. Consider this example, in which the first sentence presents a finding that is not illustrated with a quotation:

Residents described themselves as being always tired. However, their perceptions of the impact of their fatigue varied, from ‘not a factor in the care I provide’ (R8) to ‘absolutely killing me … I’m falling asleep at the bedside’ (R15).

The finding that residents are always tired does not require illustration. It is readily understandable and will not surprise anyone; therefore, following it with the quote ‘I’m tired all the time’ (R2) will feel redundant. The second part of the finding, however, benefits from illustration to show the variety of perception regarding impact.

If you do use multiple quotes to illustrate a point in your argument, then you must establish the relations between them for the reader. You can do this between the quoted excerpts or after them, as modelled above with the four examples used to illustrate progressively stronger quote contextualization.

In conclusion, quotes can be the life’s blood of your qualitative research paper. However, they are the evidence, not the argument. They do not speak for themselves and readers cannot infer what you intend them to illustrate. The authenticity principle can help you select a quote that is illustrative, succinct and representative, while the argument principle can remind you to attend to the grammatical and the rhetorical aspects of integrating the quote into the story you are telling about your research.

1 A third situation is beyond the scope of this piece: translating quoted material from another language into English. For careful consideration of this issue, please see Helmich et al. [ 6 ].

• Integrating Sources in the Text of Your Paper

As writers use facts, ideas, and quotations from the writing of others, they must integrate these into and within their own ideas. While it is important to cite your sources, it is also important that you integrate the information itself into your writing in an appropriate manner. The faulty integration of a source, even if the source is cited, can be considered plagiarism.

The following strategies for integrating sources in your paper are generally accepted by most writing and citation guidebooks. Each description includes a definition, an example of the strategy, as well as benefits and challenges involved in using the strategy. Examples of in-text citation on this page have been completed using APA citation style and have been created using an excerpt from Electric Rhetoric: Classical Rhetoric, Oralism, and a New Literacy by Kathleen E. Welch (1999).

Direct Quotation

• Partial Direct Quotations (text removed)
• Partial Direct Quotations (text introduced or concluded)

Block Quotation

Paraphrasing.

Definition : The use of the exact words of the writer, often in complete sentences, surrounded by quotation marks.

Original Text:

“If writing is a tool, then it is part of the Cartesian dualistic reality in which we all continue to live. A tool is a thing out there in the world, a palpable object that one can store in the garage and retrieve as necessary. A tool can be put aside; language cannot.”

Direct Quotation of the Text:

“If writing is a tool, then it is part of the Cartesian dualistic reality in which we all continue to live. A tool is a thing out there in the world, a palpable object that one can store in the garage and retrieve as necessary” (Welch 1999, 145).

Benefit of using this strategy :

There is never any doubt that you have given credit to the source.

Challenge of using this strategy :  Essays with many examples of direct quoting are often thought of as being “choppy” or “lacking flow.”  The reason for this is that the words and ways of using language of so many others have been included in a a single text.  Therefore, direct quotation should be used in concert with other integration strategies.

Partial Direct Quotation (used to remove text from the middle of a quotation)

Definition: The use of a direct quotation in which a middle section of the quote has been removed. The text that has been directly quoted must be enclosed in quotation marks and the source must be cited.

Partial Direct Quotation of the Text:

“If writing is a tool, then it is part of the Cartesian dualistic reality in which we all continue to live. A tool is a… palpable object that one can store in the garage and retrieve as necessary” (Welch 1999, 145).

Benefit of using this strategy: Removing a section from the middle of a quotation allows you to include the best and most pertinent part of the quotation in your essay.

Challenge of using this strategy: The point where a quotation is stopped and restarted should make a smooth connection so that the quote is clear for your reader.

Partial Direct Quotation (used in the same sentence along with your own wording)

Definition: The use of a direct quotation in which the beginning or end of the quote has been revised so that the sentence may be introduced or completed by your own words. The text that has been directly quoted must be enclosed in quotation marks and the source must be cited.

As Welch (1999, 145) has argued, the “tool” analogy for thinking about writing is a faulty premise, since “a tool is a thing out there in the world, a palpable object that one can store in the garage and retrieve as necessary. A tool can be put aside; language cannot.”

Benefit of using this strategy: This strategy allows you to flow in and out of the quote by using your own words and your own thinking.

Challenge of using this strategy: Be certain that the partial direct quotation, along with your own writing, is not so long that the sentence becomes challenging for the reader to comprehend or follow.

Definition: The use of a direct quotation of considerable length requires that the text be “blocked” or set apart from the rest of the text. The source must be cited, but the “blocking” of the quotation takes the place of quotation marks.

Format guidelines for Block Quotation:

MLA: Block quotations, or direct quotations longer than 4 lines of text, should be indented one inch from the left margin. They should be double-spaced, without quotation marks, and should include a parenthetical reference citing the source of the quote.

APA: Block quotations, or direct quotations of 40 words or more in length, should be indented one inch from the left margin. They should be double-spaced, without quotation marks, and should include a parenthetical reference citing the source of the quote.

Chicago: Block quotations, or direct quotations of 100 words or 8 lines in length, should be indented one inch from the left margin. They should be double-spaced without quotation marks.

Turabian: Block quotations, or direct quotations of 100 words or 8 lines in length, should be indented one inch from the left margin. They should be single-spaced, without quotation marks, and should include a parenthetical reference citing the source of the quote.

Benefit of using this strategy: This is less “strategy” and more “rule.” However, setting the quote apart allows the reader to distinguish between your ideas and the ideas of another writer.

Challenge of using this strategy: An overdependence on block quotation may suggest that (1) the essay is being padded for length; (2) writers using block quotations are not exhibiting their critical thinking and writing as much as they are collecting the thoughts of other writers; or (3) the writer should consider paraphrase as a way to communicate the same idea with less dependence on direct quotation.

Definition: The use of information from a source that has been reinterpreted and rewritten in the words, structure, and context of a different author. Quotation marks are not required for the paraphrased use of a source, but the source must still be cited.

Paraphrase of the text:

Attempts to define writing as a tool suggest that it is strictly a utilitarian activity, when in fact, writing is a product and component of language and cannot be used and then set aside in the same manner as a tool (Welch 1999, 145).

Benefit of using this strategy: Since the words of other writers are filtered through your own writing style, the use of paraphrasing will enhance the “flow” of your writing. In addition, it also signifies that you have synthesized the information and that you can present the information in a new way for a different audience.

Challenge of using this strategy: It may be challenging to see someone else’s words and then try to communicate the same ideas using different words and structure. Faulty paraphrasing, when writers use exact wording or sentence structure without also using quotation marks, is not only incorrect but can be considered plagiarism—whether it was intentional or accidental.

If you have questions about integrating outside sources in your writing you have a number of options. First, ask your instructor for guidance. Second, consider visiting Trinity University’s Writing Center to receive assistance. As always, review the citation style guide you are using to see more examples of these integration strategies. And as always, visit the library’s Help Desk in the Information Commons.

Citation Sources

• MLA Style, 9th ed.
• APA Style, 7th ed.
• Chicago (Notes-Bibliography Style), 17th ed.
• Chicago (Author-Date Style), 17th ed.
•      See also the online version of the  Chicago Manual of Style
• Turabian (Notes-Bibliography Style), 9th ed.
• Turabian (Author-Date Style), 9th ed.
• ASA Style, 6th ed.

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