QUOTING From sources
Original quotation:
“…it was hard to find actual yuppies because this media illusion had little
grounding in demographic realities….It was more helpful to think of ‘yuppie’ as
an adjective, not a noun, as a shorthand usefully applied to some 1980s trends
and attitudes that many indulged rather than as a mold for real people.”
(from Troy, Morning in America, page 124)
C LUMSY INTEGRATION OF QUOTED MATERIAL :
In Morning in America, they say, “It was hard to find actual yuppies.”
[Who’s “they”?]
The book Morning in America says, “It was hard to find actual yuppies.”
[Does the book “say” anything? Who is writing?]
It seemed like the country was overrun with yuppies. “It was hard to find actual yuppies.”
[Where did these words come from,
and why do they suddenly appear?]
S MOOTH INTEGRATION OF QUOTED MATERIAL :
Full-sentence quotation
In Morning in America, Gil Troy writes: “It was more helpful to think of ‘yuppie’ as…a
shorthand usefully applied to some 1980s trends and attitudes that many indulged
rather than as a mold for real people” (124).
Partial quotation
While the media created the idea that yuppies were everywhere, actually “this media
illusion had little grounding in demographic realities” (Troy 124).
Paraphrase
In Morning in America, Gil Troy writes that despite the amount of media coverage
devoted to the yuppie lifestyle, actually very few Americans fit the socioeconomic
profile of the true yuppie (124).
S OME N OTES ABOUT Q UOTING FROM L ITERATURE AND F ILM :
When quoting lines of poetry, it’s customary to give line numbers instead of page numbers and to
indicate line breaks with a slash mark (/):
Ginsberg wrote of fellow students who “passed through universities with radiant cool eyes
hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,/ who were
expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the
skull” (l. 6-7).
When quoting dialogue from novels and film, replicate the dialogue format rather than running lines
of dialogue together as a paragraph:
McInerney’s anonymous narrator has this drug-fueled exchange with a stranger:
“I love drugs,” she says….
“It’s something we have in common,” you say.
“Have you ever noticed how all the good words start with D? D and L.” (7)
T HE WORD S TUDIO , S T . L AWRENCE U NIVERSITY
Q UOTING E XERCISE
1. Choose one or two consecutive sentences from your source that might be worth quoting in
a paper. Write that sentence or those sentences here:
2. First, quote an entire idea from this passage in a sentence that begins as below. Make sure
to cite the page number in MLA parenthetical format.
[Author’s name] wrote:
3. Now, use only a partial quotation from the passage incorporated into your own words.
According to [Author’s name],
4. Next, use a paraphrase of the passage, with the author’s name included in your sentence:
[Author’s name] wrote that
5. Finally, paraphrase the passage without using the author’s name in your sentence but, of
course, citing him or her as the source:
