Quotation and Citation Guidelines for Listserv Posts
 
Setting up and transitioning to quotations
 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

Remember, though, that a colon is a strong punctuation mark, meaning you cannot continue your own thought after whatever comes after it. For example:

 

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).

 

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:

 

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.

 

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.

 

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:

 

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).

 

This is not wrong, but it offers no advantage over simply put a colon after lovers and transitioning to the quotation directly:

 

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).

 

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.

 

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):

 

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.

 

This is well done, but it is the most difficult way to use a quotation.

 

Quoting and citing prose works (short stories, novels, lines from plays not written in verse, prose poems, almost all non-fiction writing)
 

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:

 

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.

 
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).
 

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:

 

“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)

 
The question mark belongs inside the quotation mark because Wellesley is the one asking the question.
 

 

Quoting and citing verse, which includes poems of any length and parts of some plays, such as those by Shakespeare
 

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:

 

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.

 
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:
 

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).

 
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).
 
When and how to block-quote in listserv posts
 

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:

 

Again, for Eliot, the essential question is one of character, specifically virtue:

 

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)

                                                                                                            

Here, Eliot revises his judgment of a mere three pages earlier. [The commentary would presumably continue.]

 
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:
 

“What part of the middle-west?” I inquired casually.
“San Francisco.”
“I see.” (Fitzgerald 66)

 
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:
 

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:

 

Buffalo Bill’s
defunct
             who used to
             ride a watersmooth-silver
                                                     stallion
and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat
                                                                                Jesus
                                                                                          (1-7)

 
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:
 

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).

 

If you choose to identify your peer in the set-up for the quotation, do not repeat the name in the citation:
 

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).

 

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.

 
Other issues when quoting
 

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. 

 

“‘Our city and the sky correspond so perfectly,’ they answered, ‘that any change in Andria involves some novelty among the stars’” (Calvino 151).

 

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:

 

“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).

 

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.

 

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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