| Quotation and
Citation Guidelines for Listserv Posts |
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| Setting
up and transitioning to quotations |
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The
best way to transition to a quotation is usually with a colon. Using a colon helps remind you that you should set up the quotation in a substantive way, rather than with an empty phrase like Smith says or Jones writes.
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Emerson’s tone in “Experience” has
none of the exuberant self-confidence he had demonstrated in “Self-Reliance,”
and indeed expresses a loss of faith even in his own perception
of reality: “Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to
illusion. Life is a train of moods like a string of beads, and, as we
pass through them, they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint
the world their own hue, and each shows only what lies in its focus”
(131-32). The frustration and regret here are palpable, yet Emerson never
writes more beautifully than in this passage — which is indeed
far more poetic than his poems.
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Using
a comma to set up the quotation here would also create a grammatical error, a
comma splice. This has nothing to do with this
being a block or set-off quotation; the same problem would exist even
if the quotation was in-line and consisted only of the first sentence.
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Remember,
though, that a colon is a strong punctuation mark, meaning you cannot continue
your own thought after whatever comes after it. For example:
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Sassoon finds concealing his scorn of civilians nearly impossible,
as in the final couplet in “Suicide
in the Trenches”: “Sneak
home and pray you’ll never know / The hell where youth and laughter
go” (13-14).
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You must
end the sentence here; you cannot continue. If you need to do so,
use a dash instead of a colon to introduce the quotation, then use
another dash after the citation:
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Sassoon finds concealing his scorn of civilians nearly impossible,
as in “Suicide
in the Trenches” — “Sneak
home and pray you’ll never know / The hell where youth and laughter
go” (13-14) — in which the combination of the verbs Sneak and pray and the opposition of pray and hell reveal his contempt of sanctimony as well as blind patriotism.
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Note
the use of italics to call attention to words that were just quoted.
This is a better approach than quoting and citing them a second time:
it connects the analysis to the quotation without cluttering the page
with excessive quotation marks. This approach also works with short
phrases.
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Using
a comma is correct after a standard phrases such as Sassoon argues or Heller writes, but in practice these phrases are seldom necessary,
and in fact merely make the connection between your point and the quotation
less immediate:
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Millay revels in
depicting herself as cold-hearted toward past lovers when she writes,
“I find this frenzy insufficient reason / For conversation when
we meet again” (“I being born a woman and distressed”
13-14).
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This is
not wrong, but it offers no advantage over simply put a colon after
lovers and transitioning to the quotation directly:
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Millay revels in
depicting herself as cold-hearted toward former lovers: “I find
this frenzy insufficient reason / For conversation when we meet again”
(“I being born a woman and distressed” 13-14).
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Traditionally,
the word that indicates paraphrase, not direct quotation, so
on those occasions you do use a phrase like Woolf writes or Emerson claims,
do not add that if you then quote directly.
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Sometimes
you can integrate a quotation with your own sentence, in which case often
no punctuation is required. However, be careful. This can easily get you
into trouble, so it usually works best when the quotation is short (less
than a sentence):
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For
Eliot, the patterns of Yeats’s career must have offered considerable
hope, provided he could emulate it. Not surprisingly, then, Eliot
begins his essay by claiming Yeats — twenty-three years his senior
— as “from one point of view, a contemporary and not a predecessor”
(248). Thus begins a reading of Yeats born of anxiety.
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This
is well done, but it is the most difficult way to use a quotation.
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Quoting
and citing prose works (short stories, novels, lines from plays not written in verse,
prose poems, almost all non-fiction writing) |
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Quotations
of forty words or fewer of prose can be included within the body of a paragraph. If the author and title are clear from context (which usually will be the case when you are writing for this class), the page number is sufficient for the citation:
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Emerson’s tone in “Experience” has
none of the exuberant self-confidence he had demonstrated in “Self-Reliance,”
and indeed often expresses a loss of faith even in his own perception
of reality: “Life is a train of moods like a string of beads, and, as we
pass through them, they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint
the world their own hue, and each shows only what lies in its focus”
(131-32). The frustration and regret here are palpable, yet Emerson never
writes more beautifully than in this passage — which is indeed
far more poetic than his poems.
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Note: you do not need to repeat any numbers higher than the
tens place, so (131-132) is unnecessary; you should just cite it as
(131-32). |
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While
in normal writing in the United States commas and periods generally go
inside quotation marks, even if they were not part of the original quotation,
this rule changes when the sentence includes a parenthetical notation,
in which case the final period goes after the citation, as in the examples above. Note that in the
quotation above, the period comes after the citation. However, this is not true if the quotation ends with a question mark or exclamation
point, because these quotation marks change the meaning of the sentence
to some degree:
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“In
an age of nuclear weapons,” Robert Wellesley asks, “can
we accept the idea that war is an extension of diplomacy by other means,
as Clausewitz tells us?” (81)
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The question mark belongs inside the quotation mark because Wellesley is the one asking the question. |
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| Quoting
and citing verse, which includes poems of any length and parts of some plays, such as those by
Shakespeare |
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When
quoting poetry or verse drama, quotations of three lines or less may be
included within the body of the paragraph, but you must indicate the line-breaks with forward slashes (/), with a space on either side of the slash (also
called a virgule or a solidus). If the author and title are clear from
context (again, as they usually will be), cite a quotation from a poem simply by line numbers:
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When the poem continues in the soul’s
voice, thought has clearly withered along with sensation: “And yet
devoted to the pure idea / One sits delaying in the vacant square”
(8-9). Eliot is attacking the idea that the soul, which seems indistinguishable
in this poem from the mind, can be intellectually productive without the
stimulus of physical sensation.
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Note that Shakespeare uses both verse and prose in his plays. The prose sections are fully justified, while the verse sections have a ragged right margin. Makes sure to mark the line-breaks only if the passage is verse. Cite quotations from Shakespeare’s plays by act, scene, and line numbers: |
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The audience cannot be certain of Claudius’s guilt until he confesses
it in his soliloquy: “O, my offence is rank, it smells to heaven
/ It has the primal eldest sure upon’t, / A brother’s murder”
(3.3.36-38).
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Either Arabic or Roman numerals are acceptable for the act and scene numbers, but if you use Roman numerals, use lowercase letters for the latter: (III.iii.36-38). |
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| When and how to block-quote in listserv posts |
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Because mail windows vary in terms of line-length, block-quote if a prose quotation is longer than forty words. Indenting in a mail program is difficult, so you need not bother to indent block-quotations. Instead, skip a line before and after them; that makes them easier to identify. Do not add or remove quotation marks. Finally, unlike for an in-line quotation, you should put the citation after the final punctuation mark:
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Again, for Eliot,
the essential question is one of character, specifically virtue:
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Now, in theory,
there is no reason why a poet’s imagination or material should
fail in middle age or at any time before senility. For a man who is
capable of experience finds himself in a different world in every decade
of his life; as he sees it with different eyes, the materiality of his
art is continually renewed. But in fact, very few poets have shown this
capacity of adaptation to the years. (252-53)
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Here, Eliot revises
his judgment of a mere three pages earlier. [The commentary
would presumably continue.]
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If your quotation contains a paragraph break, always block-quote. For example, if you are quoting dialogue and the quotation involves more than one speaker, then block-quote: |
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“What part of the middle-west?” I inquired casually.
“San Francisco.”
“I see.” (Fitzgerald 66)
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For verse quotations, you do not need to count words because the number of lines determines whether you must block-quote or not. Block-quote if you are quoting more than three lines. However, when block-quoting verse, you must reproduce the original form — including line-breaks, capitalization, and indentation — as precisely as possible: |
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E. E. Cummings’s unusual verse structures, though playful, are essential to his poems’ meanings. The apparently disjointed arrangement
of the following lines is typical:
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Buffalo Bill’s
defunct
who
used to
ride
a watersmooth-silver
stallion
and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat
Jesus
(1-7)
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| Quoting
and citing your peers in synthesis posts |
Like quotations from a text, quotations from your peers are more effective when you set them up substantively. Make sure to cite your peer’s post by your peer’s last name and the assignment number of his or her reading post: |
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Moreover, his desire for his creation to look up to him as to a god strikes some readers as unseemly: “This desire to be blessed by his creation suggests he may be too human, too needy, to be taking on the role of Creator” (Johnson A8).
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If you choose to identify your peer in the set-up for the quotation, do not repeat the name in the citation: |
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Moreover, Robin Johnson argues that his desire for his creation to look up to him as to a god is unseemly: “This desire to be blessed by his creation suggests he may be too human, too needy, to be taking on the role of Creator” (A8).
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Do not quote your peer in order to quote the text. In other words, you should quote any relevant passages from the text yourself, and use your quotations from your peers to support your own points by engaging with their ideas and either building on them logically, using their comment to examine a different passage of the text or one from another text, critiquing their argument, or offering contrary evidence.
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| Other
issues when quoting |
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When
one set of quotation marks contains another set of quotation marks within it, the rule is to use single
quotation marks inside the double quotation marks.
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“‘Our city and the sky correspond so perfectly,’
they answered, ‘that any change in Andria involves some novelty
among the stars’” (Calvino 151).
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You
can use an ellipsis (. . .) if you want to cut out part of a quotation
that is irrelevant to your argument. Note: ellipses have spaces between
the periods, and they contain only three periods, though if you insert
one directly after a period, you should retain the period as well. Also,
you normally do not need an ellipsis at the beginning
or end of a quotation, only when you cut something in between:
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“The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to
use ordinary ones . . . to express feelings which are not in actual
emotions at all. . . . Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion but
an escape from emotion” (Eliot 43).
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If you wish
to omit lines from a set-off poetry quotation, use a line of ellipses
approximately equal to the surrounding lines to indicate the placement
of the break, no matter how many lines you are actually omitting.
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The ever-smitten Hermes empty left
His golden throne, bent warm on amorous theft:
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
For somewhere in that sacred island dwelt
A nymph, to whom all hoofed Satyrs knelt;
At whose white feet the languid Tritons poured
Pearls, while on land they wither’d and adored.
(I.7-16)
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