A Really Dull Title for a Snappy Lesson
This “paper” is just a sample that I will use in order to show you how to integrate
quotations and citations into your text. When you are paraphrasing, you—obviously—
don’t have to use quotation marks. After all, a paraphrase is information that you’ve
borrowed from someone, but it isn’t the exact words. However, it is important that you
give credit where credit is due, and a good way to do that is to place the author’s name at
the end of the paragraph holding the information you’ve paraphrased. How do you do
this? It’s easy. You just put the author’s last name and the page number where you
obtained the information in parenthesis. Do you need a comma between the author’s
name and the page number? NO. The only punctuation you’ll need is after the
parenthesis, or what English teachers call the parenthetical citation (Yarrow 234).
Well that’s easy enough, but it still doesn’t show you how to use quotes in the
text. What I mean is, if you are directly borrowing material from someone and not just
rewording it, how do you give credit? You use quotations! As you know, you almost
always introduce a quotation with a comma or colon. You introduce a quote with a
comma when your tag (introductory phrase/clause) is not a complete sentence; you
introduce your quote with a colon when your tag is a complete sentence. Then, once you
conclude your quotation with the end quotation mark, you create the parenthetical
citation of the last name of the author with the page number of the text. Then end your
parenthesis and put in the period. Here, I’ll show you. The first lines of the book Alice in
Wonderland are, “Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the
bank, and of having nothing to do” (Carroll 1). Let me try one more time because “trying
more than once is always important” (Powers 5).
But what if you’re citing from a web page? Well, you don’t want to put the entire
web address in a parenthetical citation. It would just take up too much space. So, you
put in the last name of the author of the web page. If you can’t find the author of a web
page (which is not uncommon), use the first word of the title. Let’s give it a try, shall
we? Probably the most notable of contemporary authors to hit the New York scene is
Elvin Shems, “A virtual genius when it comes to colon and semicolon manipulation”
(Wouk).
Finally, what do you do when you have a lot to quote? If you have more than
four lines of prose or poetry to quote, you need to do two things. First, make sure you
actually need all of it. Don’t just stick a long quote in to take up space. Second, if you
do indeed need to quote all the lines, you have to format it differently. First, introduce
your quote with a colon (even if it isn’t a complete sentence). Then for the quote itself,
you start a new line, indent one inch on the left margin (keep the right margin where it
is), and type your lines. Then, you put your end punctuation in and finally your
parenthetical citation. Note that you DO NOT use quotation marks. These are used to
show the reader you’re borrowing someone else’s material, but changing your formatting
also does this, so to do both is be repetitively redundant. Let’s give it a try, shall we?
I’m really enjoying the book 1984. The opening is quite poignant:
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the
vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions,
