How to gracefully include quotes in your writing Integrating Quotations

 Never just drop a quotation into your paper. Always introduce it with your own prose.  There are three main ways to introduce quotations. These include:  Incorporating the Quotation  Introducing the Quotation  Blocking the Quotation

Incorporate the Quotation  Incorporate the quotation into your sentence, punctuating it just as you would if it was not a quotation.  As Bob dreams that he is being beaten, he hopes he “would become unconscious but [he] couldn’t” (69).  Bob appraises Mrs. Harrison derisively, thinking that “she looked so […] complacent, sitting there in her two-hundred dollar chair […] bought with dough her husband had made overcharging poor hard-working colored people for his incompetent services, that I had a crazy impulse to needle her” (51).

Introduce the Quotation  Introduce the quotation by using an attributive tag such as “he writes,” “she claims,” etc.  To describe his childlike consciousness, Wright writes, “Each event spoke with a cryptic tongue. And the moments of living slowly revealed their coded meanings” (7).  After going to Memphis and boarding with Mrs. Moss, Wright wonders, “Was it wise to remain here with a seventeen-year-old girl eager for marriage and a mother equally anxious to have her marry me?” (214).

Introduce the Quotation  Introduce the quotation by writing a full sentence. Then use a colon to introduce the quotation, which should itself be a full sentence.  Bob’s description of Madge emphasizes her fake appearance: “She was a peroxide blonde with a large-featured, overly made-up face, and she had a large, bright-painted, fleshy mouth” (19).  Wright explains his goals for his writing: “I was striving for a level of expression that matched those of the novels I read” (280).

Block the Quotation  Block a quotation if it is four lines or longer. Indent the quotation one half of an inch on both sides, and punctuate it like the following example. Wright describes how his mother’s illness affected him: My mother’s suffering grew into a symbol in my mind, gathering to itself all the poverty, the ignorance, the helplessness; the painful, baffling, hunger-ridden days and hours; the restless moving, the futile seeking, the uncertainty, the fear, the dread. (100)