Quotations: Using Brackets and Ellipses
When you quote external sources in your essay, quote only what you need to make your point. If you only mean to comment on three lines in a paragraph, then quote those three lines rather than the whole thing. Use an ellipsis to signal omissions in quoted material. Use brackets to insert clarifying information into a quotation.
ORIGINAL:
Tony Award-winners Bernadette Peters, Joanna Gleason, and the rest of the original Broadway cast weave their magic spell over you in this masterful presentation of Stephen Sondheim’s musical classic, Into the Woods, a seamless fusion of fairytales that strikes at the child’s heart within us all.
Suppose you were only interested in the last part of this sentence. Here is how you could quote it:
According to one critic, “Sondheim . . . strikes at the child’s heart within us all.”
Note that the quotation does not begin with the ellipsis. The quotation marks are sufficient to signal the beginning of your quoted material. Use an ellipsis to indicate omissions in the middle or at the end of a quoted sentence.
If you have omitted words at the end of a quoted sentence, the ellipsis must be followed by a period.
Sondheim’s play centers around “a seamless fusion of fairytales . .
. .”
Sometimes, for quotations to make grammatical sense in your sentence, it is necessary to insert extra information. Use brackets to insert any necessary verbs or phrases to the quotation.
According to one critic, “Sondheim’s musical classic, Into the
Woods, [creates] a seamless fusion of fairytales that strikes at the child’s heart within us all.”
Remember, whenever you use quoted material, integrate it into the natural grammar of your sentence. Avoid free-floating quotations; instead, connect quoted material grammatically to your own writing. The integrated sentence should sound like a single, coherent sentence when read aloud.
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It is also important to avoid DROPPED QUOTATIONS. These are quotations that are just “dropped” into your writing without any explanation of who is speaking or what it means.
For example, suppose you are writing about the famous novel by J.D. Salinger, Catcher in the Rye, and you want to use a quote spoken by the novel’s main character, Holden Caulfield.
DROPPED QUOTATION:
Holden gets frustrated and decides to leave. “People are always
ruining things for you” (Salinger, 1954, p. 88).
See how that quotation is simply “dropped in the middle of the writing there? There is no introduction to the quoted passage. Avoid this by introducing the quote, -- explain who is speaking, what’s happening, etc.
INTEGRATED QUOTATION:
Holden gets frustrated and decides to leave, claiming that “people
are always ruining things for you” (Salinger, 1954, p. 88).
OR:
Holden gets frustrated and decides to leave. He claims that
“people are always ruining things for you” (Salinger, 1954, p. 88).