Incorporating quotations into your writing

You should incorporate quotations into your writing instead of dropping material into your essay without a smooth connection. Always distinguish your ideas from those of your sources by introducing your quotes.  You should use identifying phrases such as "Professor Rody shows us that…." Other verbs that you can use are acknowledges, suggests, concludes, insists, predicts, discloses, observes, believes, explains, summarizes, implies, notes, comments, claims, illustrates, reports, warns, admits, finds, concurs, affirms, proposes, speculates, indicates.

You should also clearly connect the quotation (or paraphrase) to your ideas. Show your reader the relevance to your thesis—the writer make connections not the reader. If quotations are simply dropped into a paper without significance being show, a reader may become confused as to the appropriateness and relevance of that particular quotation.

If you do not use a running acknowledgment, you should work the quotation into your sentence.

The following examples are from The Holt Handbook:

Avoid: For the Amish, the public school system represents a problem. "A serious problem confronting the Amish Society from the viewpoint of the Amish themselves is the threat of absorption into mass society through the values promoted in the public school system" (Hostetler 193).

Better: For the Amish, the public school system represents "the threat of absorption into mass society" (Hostetler 193).

The attribution could be in the middle: "A serious problem confronting the Amish Society from the viewpoint of the Amish themselves," observes Hostetler,” is the threat of absorption into mass society through the values promoted in the public school system" (193).

The attribution could also be at the end: The Amish are also concerned about their children's exposure to the public school system's values, notes Hostetler (193).