thanks to Anne-Marie Hall, UA Writing Program

Integrating Sources into Your Essay

QUOTATION: exact words of a source. When quoting, you must reproduce the source exactly as it appears in the original, word for word, comma for comma. If you are not exact, you risk misrepresenting your source and calling your own credibility into question.

WHY QUOTE? Use quotations when you want the source’s exact words because:

  • The original wording is so eloquent the idea cannot be expressed any other way,
  • Special terminology renders a paraphrase difficult, or
  • You are going to be closely analyzing or interpreting a quotation, so word-for-word reproduction is needed.

CHOOSING QUOTATIONS: Select quotations that accomplish one of these objectives:

  • Support a point by lending authority, explaining, or justifying;
  • Clarify a point by giving an example, illustration, fact, or figure; or
  • Provide the exact words and voice of your side of the argument or your opposition.

INTEGRATING QUOTES INTO YOUR TEXT:

1. LEAD-INS: Common lead-ins are “according to,” “a study by ______found that,” and “in an interview with.”

According to Catherine Calloway in her essay on American literature and film of the Vietnam War, the most popular view of the returning veteran has come from the media, which has frequently depicted the typical Vietnam veteran as a “raging, shell-shocked lunatic who must be avoided and/or watched carefully to make sure that he does not explode in a paroxysm of unmitigated violence” (143).

2. QUOTES AS SYNTACTICAL UNITS: This method is trickier because you need to make sure that the combination of your words and the source’s words create a smooth, grammatically correct sentence.

O’Brien’s assertion that Vietnam War films depict veterans as flaky characters who are often “baleful, explosive, spiritually exhausted, tormented, with brains like whipped cream” helps us realize how this stereotype has been reinforced in Hollywood (73).

3. SENTENCE-COLON INTRODUCTIONS: This method works best when you have a block of text you want to quote, but you can also use it for a shorter quotation where there is no smooth way of incorporating the quotation into your own sentence.

Calloway argues that using film when teaching the literature of the Vietnam War is justified and valuable: “Using Vietnam War literature and film in the classroom can challenge students’ preconceived perceptions of the war and help them gain a more responsible view of American involvement in Indochina” (141).

DO NOT USE ONE INTRODUCTION FOR SEVERAL QUOTATIONS.

DO NOT STRING QUOTATIONS TOGETHER ONE AFTER ANOTHER.

MECHANICS OF QUOTING

  1. TO BLOCK OR NOT TO BLOCK
  • If a quotation is no longer than FOUR type lines of prose or THREE lines of poetry, incorporate the quotation into your own text.
  • If a quotation is longer than FOUR typed lines of prose or THREE lines of poetry (or lyrics), set it off in block form. Indent five spaces, and leave a double-space before the first line and after the last line to set off the quotation.
  1. MAKING CHANGES IN QUOTATIONS
  • Underline or italicize for emphasis—and add the phrase (emphasis added) at the end of quotation after the quotation marks, before the end punctuation.

According to Calloway, “literature and film cannot be used in isolation to teach the Vietnam War; they cannot be used as substitutes for the history of the war” (emphasis added) (142).

  • Place brackets around changed or added words—substituting a name for a pronoun, changing a verb tense, etc. Do these things for clarity or grammatical consistency and then extend or change only a word or two, not whole parts of the quotation. Brackets are NOT the same as parentheses.

In an interview with Tim O’Brien, Catherine Calloway asserts that O’Brien believes movies released in the 1970’s “reinforce[ed] media hype and create[d] stereotyped roles for the veteran” (143).

  • Insert ellipses to indicate omissions in quotations. Use three spaced periods (…) to show you have omitted words. If you omit more than a sentence, use a period plus three periods for the omission (….). Ordinarily, you do not need to use ellipses at the beginning or end of a quotation.

When viewing and discussing texts surrounding the Vietnam War, students must learn to “question the validity of different versions of the war and acknowledge differences between artistic and historical accounts of the same events…asking themselves whether any literary work or film shows the whole truth of war” (Calloway 144).

  1. PUNCTUATING QUOTATIONS: Use double quotation marks (“) for all quoted material EXCEPT when a quotation occurs within a quotation. Then use single quotation marks (‘).

In discussing Vietnam War literature with students, Eric Leed argues that within war literature there is a “new subject for interdisciplinary study—‘the transformation of personality in war’—and that provides scholars with a new methodological approach” (162).

  1. END MARKS: As a general rule, commas and periods go inside ending quotation marks; all semicolons and colons go outside, and question marks and exclamation points go inside if part or the quotation, outside if not. However, when putting in parenthetical citation of author and page number, the rule changes. The period or comma goes outside the parentheses and therefore no period or comma appears at the end of the quotation (see above). If the quotation ends in a question mark or exclamation point, it goes inside the quotation marks followed by the parenthetical citation and end period.

O’Brien asks, “Is not our preoccupation with the Vietnam War veteran an international issue based on stereotypes?” (123).

PARAPHRASE GUIDELINES:

  • A paraphrase may contain NONE of the original wording or grammatical structures of your original source. It is entirely your own words and should not be identified by quotation marks or indenting. However, you do need to indicate to your reader where your paraphrase begins, so use a lead-in technique such as one of those used for quotations. A good way to lead into a paraphrase is as follows:

According to a report done on war and personality, reported by Eric Leeds in his book No Man’s Land: Combat and Identity in World War I—and lead into your paraphrase.

  • Document the source of the paraphrase. A parenthetical citation should appear at the end of the paraphrased material, just as it marks the end of quoted material.

SUMMARY GUIDELINES:

  • Same as for paraphrasing. Introduce the summary to show where it begins, document with a parenthetical citation at the end, and word it in language that is entirely your own, not that of the source.