T HR E E

“as he himself puts it”

The Art of Quoting

A key premise of this book is that to launch an effective

argument you need to write the arguments of others into your
text. One of the best ways to do so is by not only summarizing
what “they say,” as suggested in Chapter 2, but by quoting their
exact words. Quoting someone else’s words gives a tremendous
amount of credibility to your summary and helps ensure that
it is fair and accurate. In a sense, then, quotations function as
a kind of proof of evidence, saying to readers: “Look, I’m not
just making this up. She makes this claim, and here it is in
her exact words.”
Yet many writers make a host of mistakes when it comes to
quoting, not the least of which is the failure to quote enough
in the first place, if at all. Some writers quote too little—
perhaps because they don’t want to bother going back to
the original text and looking up the author’s exact words, or
because they think they can reconstruct the author’s ideas from
memory. At the opposite extreme are writers who so overquote
that they end up with texts that are short on commentary of
their own—maybe because they lack confidence in their abil-
ity to comment on the quotations, or because they don’t fully

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understand what they’ve quoted and therefore have trouble

explaining what the quotations mean.
But the main problem with quoting arises when writers assume
that quotations speak for themselves. Because the meaning of a
quotation is obvious to them, many writers assume that this mean-
ing will also be obvious to their readers, when often it is not.
Writers who make this mistake think that their job is done when
they’ve chosen a quotation and inserted it into their text. They
draft an essay, slap in a few quotations, and whammo, they’re done.
Such writers fail to see that quoting means more than sim-
ply enclosing what “they say” in quotation marks. In a way,
quotations are orphans: words that have been taken from their
original contexts and that need to be integrated into their new
textual surroundings. This chapter offers two key ways to pro-
duce this sort of integration: (1) by choosing quotations wisely,
with an eye to how well they support a particular part of your
text, and (2) by surrounding every major quotation with a frame
explaining whose words they are, what the quotation means,
and how the quotation relates to your own text. The point we
want to emphasize is that quoting what “they say” must always
be connected with what you say.

quote relevant passages

Before you can select appropriate quotations, you need to have

a sense of what you want to do with them—that is, how they
will support your text at the particular point where you insert
them. Be careful not to select quotations just for the sake of
demonstrating that you’ve read the author’s work; you need to
make sure they support your own argument.

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However, finding relevant quotations is not always easy.

In fact, sometimes quotations that were initially relevant to
your argument, or to a key point in it, become less so as your
text changes during the process of writing and revising. Given
the evolving and messy nature of writing, you may sometimes
think that you’ve found the perfect quotation to support your
argument, only to discover later on, as your text develops, that
your focus has changed and the quotation no longer works. It
can be somewhat misleading, then, to speak of finding your
thesis and finding relevant quotations as two separate steps,
one coming after the other. When you’re deeply engaged in
the writing and revising process, there is usually a great deal
of back-and-forth between your argument and any quotations
you select.

frame every quotation

Finding relevant quotations is only part of your job; you also

need to present them in a way that makes their relevance and
meaning clear to your readers. Since quotations do not speak
for themselves, you need to build a frame around them in which
you do that speaking for them.
Quotations that are inserted into a text without such a
frame are sometimes called “dangling” quotations for the way
they’re left dangling without any explanation. One teacher
we’ve worked with, Steve Benton, calls these “hit-and-run”
quotations, likening them to car accidents in which the driver
speeds away and avoids taking responsibility for the dent in
your fender or the smashed taillights, as in the figure that
follows.

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What follows is a typical hit-and-run quotation by a stu-

dent responding to an essay by Deborah Tannen, a linguistics
professor and prominent author, who complains that academ-
ics value opposition over agreement.

Deborah Tannen writes about academia. Academics believe “that

intellectual inquiry is a metaphorical battle. Following from that is
a second assumption that the best way to demonstrate intellectual
prowess is to criticize, find fault, and attack.”
I agree with Tannen. Another point Tannen makes is that . . .

Since this student fails to introduce the quotation adequately

or explain why he finds it worth quoting, readers will have
a hard time reconstructing what Tannen argued. First, the
student simply gives us the quotation from Tannen without
telling us who Tannen is or even indicating that the quoted
words are hers. In addition, the student does not explain what
he takes Tannen to be saying or how her claims connect with
his own. Instead, he simply abandons the quotation in his
haste to zoom on to another point.

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 The Art of Quoting

To adequately frame a quotation, you need to insert it into

what we like to call a “quotation sandwich,” with the statement
introducing it serving as the top slice of bread and the explana-
tion following it serving as the bottom slice. The introductory
or lead-in claims should explain who is speaking and set up what
the quotation says; the follow-up statements should explain
why you consider the quotation to be important and what you
take it to say.

templates for introducing quotations

j X states, “Not all steroids should be banned from sports.”

j As the prominent philosopher X puts it, “ .”

j According to X, “ .”

j X himself writes, “ .”

j In her book, , X maintains that “ .”

j Writing in the journal Commentary, X complains that “ .”

j In X’s view, “ .”

j X agrees when she writes, “ .”

j X disagrees when he writes, “ .”

j X complicates matters further when she writes, “ .”

templates for explaining quotations

The one piece of advice about quoting that our students say
they find most helpful is to get in the habit of following every

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major quotation by explaining what it means, using a template

like one of the ones below.

j Basically, X is warning that the proposed solution will only make

the problem worse.

j In other words, X believes .

j In making this comment, X urges us to .

j X is corroborating the age-old adage that .

j X’s point is that .

j The essence of X’s argument is that .

When offering such explanations, it is important to use lan-

guage that accurately reflects the spirit of the quoted passage. It
is often serviceable enough in introducing a quotation to write
“X states” or “X asserts,” but in most cases you can add preci-
sion to your writing by introducing the quotation in more vivid
See pp. 40–41
terms. Since, in the example above, Tannen is clearly
for a list of alarmed by the culture of “attack” that she describes,
action verbs for
summarizing it would be more accurate to use language that reflects
what other say.
that alarm: “Tannen is alarmed that,” “Tannen is dis-
turbed by,” “Tannen deplores,” or (in our own formulation
here) “Tannen complains.”
Consider, for example, how the earlier passage on Tannen
might be revised using some of these moves.

Deborah Tannen, a prominent linguistics professor, complains that

academia is too combative. Rather than really listening to others,
Tannen insists, academics habitually try to prove one another wrong.
As Tannen herself puts it, “We are all driven by our ideological

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assumption that intellectual inquiry is a metaphorical battle,” that

“the best way to demonstrate intellectual prowess is to criticize, find
fault, and attack.” In short, Tannen objects that academic commu-
nication tends to be a competition for supremacy in which loftier
values like truth and consensus get lost.
Tannen’s observations ring true to me because I have often felt
that the academic pieces I read for class are negative and focus on
proving another theorist wrong rather than stating a truth . . .

This revision works, we think, because it frames or nests Tannen’s

words, integrating them and offering guidance about how they
should be read. Instead of launching directly into the quoted
words, as the previous draft had done, this revised version iden-
tifies Tannen (“a prominent linguistics professor”) and clearly
indicates that the quoted words are hers (“as Tannen herself puts
it”). And instead of being presented without explanation as it
was before, the quotation is now presented as an illustration of
Tannen’s point that, as the student helpfully puts it, “academics
habitually try to prove one another wrong” and compete “for
supremacy.” In this way, the student explains the quotation while
restating it in his own words, thereby making it clear that the
quotation is being used purposefully instead of having been stuck
in simply to pad the essay or the works-cited list.

blend the author’s words

with your own

This new framing material also works well because it accurately

represents Tannen’s words while giving those words the stu-
dent’s own spin. Instead of simply repeating Tannen word for
word, the follow-up sentences echo just enough of her language

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while still moving the discussion in the student’s own direc-

tion. Tannen’s “battle,” “criticize,” “find fault,” and “attack,”
for instance, get translated by the student into claims about
how “combative” Tannen thinks academics are and how she
thinks they “habitually try to prove one another wrong.” In
this way, the framing creates a kind of hybrid mix of Tannen’s
words and those of the writer.

can you overanalyze a quotation?

But is it possible to overexplain a quotation? And how do you

know when you’ve explained a quotation thoroughly enough?
After all, not all quotations require the same amount of explan-
atory framing, and there are no hard-and-fast rules for knowing
how much explanation any quotation needs. As a general rule,
the most explanatory framing is needed for quotations that may
be hard for readers to process: quotations that are long and
complex, that are filled with details or jargon, or that contain
hidden complexities.
And yet, though the particular situation usually dictates
when and how much to explain a quotation, we will still offer
one piece of advice: when in doubt, go for it. It is better to
risk being overly explicit about what you take a quotation to
mean than to leave the quotation dangling and your readers in
doubt. Indeed, we encourage you to provide such explanatory
framing even when writing to an audience that you know to be
familiar with the author being quoted and able to interpret your
quotations on their own. Even in such cases, readers need to see
how you interpret the quotation, since words—especially those
of controversial figures—can be interpreted in various ways
and used to support different, sometimes opposing, agendas.

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Your readers need to see what you make of the material you’ve
quoted, if only to be sure that your reading of the material and
theirs are on the same page.

how not to introduce quotations

We want to conclude this chapter by surveying some ways

not to introduce quotations. Although some writers do so,
you should not introduce quotations by saying something like
“Orwell asserts an idea that” or “A quote by Shakespeare says.”
Introductory phrases like these are both redundant and mislead-
ing. In the first example, you could write either “Orwell asserts
that” or “Orwell’s assertion is that,” rather than redundantly
combining the two. The second example misleads readers, since
it is the writer who is doing the quoting, not Shakespeare (as
“a quote by Shakespeare” implies).
The templates in this book will help you avoid such mis-
takes. Once you have mastered templates like “as X puts it”
or “in X’s own words,” you probably won’t even have to think
about them—and will be free to focus on the challenging ideas
that templates help you frame.

Exercises

1. Find a published piece of writing that quotes something that

“they say.” How has the writer integrated the quotation into
his or her own text? How has he or she introduced the quota-
tion, and what, if anything, has the writer said to explain it
and tie it to his or her own text? Based on what you’ve read
in this chapter, are there any changes you would suggest?

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2. Look at something you have written for one of your classes.

Have you quoted any sources? If so, how have you integrated
the quotation into your own text? How have you intro-
duced it? explained what it means? indicated how it relates
to your text? If you haven’t done all these things, revise your
text to do so, perhaps using the Templates for Introducing
Quotations (p. 47) and Explaining Quotations (pp. 47–48).
If you’ve not written anything with quotations, try revising
some academic text you’ve written to do so.

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