3 Ways to Incorporate Quoted Material Into Your Writing:

1. DROPPED QUOTES--

Dropped quotes are partial phrases taken from the middle of a piece of text. Dropped quotes are comprised of only a few words and give no direction as to who the speaker is or the content it’s referring to. These must always be introduced within a sentence, and cannot comprise a complete sentence on their own.

Example: As Rembrandt’s skill developed, he began painting landscapes that are “romantic and visionary” (Wallace 96).

2. FULL SENTENCE QUOTES--

As the name implies, full sentence quotes are created by quoting complete sentences that take up less than 4 lines. Although these are complete sentences, they cannot be used as stand-alone sentences in your paper. Introduce them with an additional complete sentence or a signal phrase.

Example: Over the course of time Rembrandt’s work began to change and focus on different themes, but as Wallace points out: "Rembrandt’s great gift as an etcher lay in preserving a sense of spontaneity while scrupulously attending to close detail” (142).

Example: As Wallace states, “Rembrandt’s great gift as an etcher lay in preserving a sense of spontaneity while scrupulously attending to close detail” (142).

3. INDIRECT QUOTES--

Indirect quotes, or paraphrasing, is when you use a sentence from a source but change the wording slightly into your own words. This is useful if you’ve too many direct quotes, or full sentence quotes, in your paper. Be careful to avoid plagiarism though by changing at least 50% of the sentence.

• Change the structure of the sentence by moving parts around. You can use a thesaurus to exchange words with synonyms.

• Paraphrasing should only be done if you are certain that you understand the content you are copying. If you are unclear as to the meaning of the quote, you won’t be able to put it adequately into your own words.

• When you write your paraphrase, don’t look at the quote. Keep the meaning in your head and create a new sentence to match.

Example: 

The original passage:

Students frequently overuse direct quotation in taking notes, and as a result they overuse quotations in the final [research] paper. Probably only about 10% of your final manuscript should appear as directly quoted matter. Therefore, you should strive to limit the amount of exact transcribing of source materials while taking notes. Lester, James D. Writing Research Papers. 2nd ed. (1976): 46-47.

A legitimate paraphrase:

In research papers students often quote excessively, failing to keep quoted material down to a desirable level. Since the problem usually originates during note taking, it is essential to minimize the material recorded verbatim (Lester 46-47).

An acceptable summary:

Students should take just a few notes in direct quotation from sources to help minimize the amount of quoted material in a research paper (Lester 46-47).

A plagiarized version:

Students often use too many direct quotations when they take notes, resulting in too many of them in the final research paper. In fact, probably only about 10% of the final copy should consist of directly quoted material. So it is important to limit the amount of source material copied while taking notes.