The most familiar use of quotation marks is to show that someone is speaking. This kind of quoting is seen everywhere from novels to newspaper articles. A few quotes can add a nice touch to a research paper or essay; however, too many quotes break up the flow of writing and should be avoided. Not more than five percent of an essay should be in quotes. Put the rest in your own words and just cite the source each time you use it (see below).
When writing about research, you need to show where you found your information by either quoting or paraphrasing it. For example, if you read "Mary had a little lamb" and were writing an essay about the whiteness of the lamb's fleece, you could either quote, "its fleece was white as snow," (Smith, 103) or paraphrase, explaining in your own words that the narrator of the poem claimed that Mary's lamb had snow-white wool (Smith, 103).
A quote must exactly reproduce what was written or said.
WHEN TO USE QUOTATION MARKS
Use quotation marks for the title of any short piece, such as an article, chapter, story or poem that is generally printed along with other short works in a larger book, magazine, scholarly journal or newspaper. Use quotation marks when you reproduce a segment taken from your reading, exactly as printed in the text. The one exception is a long quote (more than three or four sentences). In that case, set the quoted material apart, indenting it, like the following:
This is a long quote from somebody else's book. I really could have paraphrased and avoided this jarring intrusion into my own style of writing, but I was a tad lazy and just stuck it in anyway. I hope you don't find it too irritating. (Thompson, 1997) |
Of course, if you are reproducing (e.g. "quoting") a graph or other visual, such as a diagram of how a cookie cutter works, you would inset it and cite the source at the end of it, as I've done above with my own long quote.
Do not use quotation marks for the title of an entire book or other long work that is generally printed by itself. Do not use quotation marks if you are paraphrasing what someone else said or wrote (but be sure to give them credit with a parenthetic note).
THE SYNTAX OF QUOTATIONS
Any quote must fit into the syntax of your own sentence. For example, "everywhere that Mary went," (Smith, 103). The preceding group of words is not a sentence, because I did not fit the quote into my own set of words to make a single complete sentence. However, I can revise it.
An example of fitting a quote into the syntax of your own sentence would be to insert "everywhere that Mary went" (Smith, 103) into your sentence like this, so that it helped to complete your sentence.
QUOTING QUOTES
If the text you are quoting is already in quotation marks, the rule is to use "double quotes" for your whole quote and 'single quotes' for the part that is quoted in the text. For example, look again at "Mary Had Little Lamb," especially where "Mary said, 'its fleece is white as snow'" (Smith, 103). Note that I've also put the title of the poem into quotes.
PARENTHETIC DOCUMENTATION
Whether your information is quoted or paraphrased, you MUST use a parenthetic note for each idea or piece of information that you present, showing where you found it. Never go for more than one paragraph before noting the source(s) for the information in that paragraph. Each parenthetic documentation should indicate the last name of the author and either the date of the publication (Smith, 1996) or, for a direct quote, the author and page number (Smith, 103). The entire reference for each source will be in your List of Works Cited at the end of your paper.
