English 10 / Unit 1: Close Reading and Literary Analysis
1.5 Integrating Quotations
Notes
Quotations should fit smoothly into your own sentences.
- Introduce a quotation with a signal phrase: The narrator admits, "..."
- Embed short phrases into your own grammar: The house is described as "leering at the town."
- Use brackets to change a word so the quote fits: She says that "[her] hands were shaking."
- Use an ellipsis (...) to leave out words, without changing the meaning.
- Avoid a dropped quotation: a quote standing alone as its own sentence with no introduction.
- Choose short, precise evidence; quote only the words you will analyze.
Practice
Which sentence integrates a quotation most smoothly?
The quoted words are embedded within the student's own sentence.
A writer uses an ellipsis inside a quotation. What does it signal?
An ellipsis shows an omission.
Original text: "I was terrified of the dark." A student writes: The narrator admits that "[he] was terrified of the dark." The brackets show that:
Brackets mark words the writer has changed or added.
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