Transcript Quotation in Academic Papers (PowerPoint)

 Quotation
means using someone else’s words
within your own writing. You must give that
other writer or speaker credit for those
words or you are committing plagiarism
(stealing someone else’s intellectual output).
You might quote because someone else has
phrased an idea exceptionally accurately or
cleverly, and you want to preserve that phrasing.
 You might quote because you are using an idea
or fact, but you got that fact from someone else,
and you need to reveal that to your reader.
 You might quote because you are presenting an
interpretation of someone else’s words or ideas,
and the only way you can really prove your
interpretation is to show how you got clues for it
from that person’s writing itself. You have to
quote a chunk of writing in order to analyze it.

 Know
why you want to use the quote. Don’t
just stuff it in there because your instructor
said you need to use quotes. Be clear about
the point you want the quote to make.
 You
can quote chunks of almost any size: one
or two words, parts of sentences, whole
sentences, or groups of sentences.
 Quote
only what you need. Extra material is
confusing and distracting. You may think
you’re doing yourself a favor by taking up
extra space, but it’s just the opposite.
 Say
you want to quote pretty much an entire
paragraph, but you know that that would be
too much. You can cut out repetitive or
unnecessary material from the middle of a
passage to make it tighter. However, if you
cut out some words, the material on both
ends needs to fit together and make sense
when read together.
 Also,
use ellipses (. . . ) to indicate the cut.

You usually can not quote the same piece of text
twice. You can use it once and later refer back to it
in passing, but do not try to quote the passage a
second time as if it were a new piece of evidence.

You do not have to use quotes from a text in the
order in which they appear in the original text. In
other words, you don’t have to give a quote from
page 7 before a quote from page 102 just to follow
their page order. The order of your paper will dictate
which parts of the text you need to use and when you
need to use them.
 Do
not call quotes “quotes” in your own
paper. Refer to the quote as a “passage,” a
“statement,” an “excerpt,” or something
less blunt than “quote.”
 Don’t change the wording or verb tense of a
quotation.
 Don’t put quotation marks around words just
because they are slang or commonly said
expressions. That’s not quoting, and it is not
a correct use of quotation marks.
 Whenever
possible, integrate the quote into
a sentence that introduces it. Avoid
presenting a quote as a sentence all on its
own.
 You
can blend the quote into a larger
sentence.


The future champion could, as he put it, “float like a
butterfly and sting like a bee.”
The prisoners escaped “by squeezing through a tiny
window eighteen feet above the floor of their cell.”
 You
can formally introduce the quote. This
means write a full sentence of introduction,
followed by a colon and then the quote.

Morrow views personal ads as an art form: “The
personal ad is like a haiku of self-celebration, a brief
solo played on one’s own horn.”
 You
can use an expression such as he said.
This is known as a tag line.
 Without
batting an eye, the student said,
“I knew I would get an A.”
 “You can be a little ungrammatical if you
come from the right part of the country,”
said Robert Frost.

You can identify the original speaker or writer of
the quote in a little interruption, but it has to be
done smoothly.
“Of course she didn’t know he was a murderer
when she married him,” said the sheriff, “but
she did stay with him after she found out.”
 “I was a flop as a reporter,” admitted E.B.
White. “Every piece had to be a masterpiece—
and before you knew it, Tuesday was
Wednesday.”
