Study Skills Study SkillsDocumentation E Entering Direct Quotations

-1- Quoting Poetry

1. Quoting Two Lines: Use a slash to set off the lines In his poem “ Tetuán, ” Claude Mckay says: “ To Tetuán, that fort of struggle and strife / Where chagrined Andalusian Moors retired. ” (1-2) * The same thing applies to quoting three lines.

2. Quoting Four or More Lines: Enter the lines as an inset In the second stanza of “The Second Coming” the poet says: Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi (Yeats 9-12) The quotation above is not enclosed within quotation marks.

Omission: Should be indicated using ellipsis (1) Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. (Yeats 1-4,6-8 )

Omission (2)... the centre cannot hold;... the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. (Yeats 3-8 )

-2- Quoting Other Material

1. Short quotations: Enclose them within double quotation marks Elleke Boehmer writes that “versions of thought, both sophisticated and crude... were used to give colonial masters virtually unbounded rights over the lands and subjects they claimed.” (Colonial and Postcolonial Literature 380)

2. Long quotations: Enter them as insets In this respect, Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helln Tiffin write: A characteristic of dominated literatures is an unevitable tendency towards subversion, and a study of the subversive strategies employed by post-colonial writers would reveal both the configurations of domination and both the configurations of domination and the imaginative and creative responses to this condition. (The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Postcolonial Literatures 33)

Single Quotation Marks ‘ ’ Yet, use single quotation marks to enclose a citation within a citation. Example: “A play is not people speaking extempore; it is ‘the work of the poet.’ Art is not nature, and there would be no point to it if it were.” (David Daiches, Critical Approaches to Literature 123)

Essential Quoting Devices Essential Quoting Devices

1. Ellipsis:... or.... ? 1- Three spaced periods (... ) “show an omission in the interior of a sentence of a direct quotation.” (Heineman & Willis 110) (example 1) 2- Four spaced periods (.... ) indicate the omission of “the end of a sentence or more than one sentence.” (ibid.) (example 2)

Examples Example 1: “Poetry is... an escape from emotion” (T. “Poetry is... an escape from emotion” (T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent”) S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent”) Example 2: “ My first cousins were my ‘brothers’ in my language.... In fact, when a man died, he language.... In fact, when a man died, he was taken to his mother’s people to be buried." was taken to his mother’s people to be buried." (Michel Fabre, Conversations with Chinua Achebe) (Michel Fabre, Conversations with Chinua Achebe)

2. Square/Box Brackets: ] [ Brackets tell your reader: “This material is not in the text I am quoting, but I have added it or changed it so that it will make sense in this context.” (Heineman & Willis 91)

These corrections include: - “adding explanatory phrases” - “changing pronouns, verb tenses, and transitional words or phrases” - “correcting errors such as misspellings” (ibid.)

Example “Sometime before he finished it, Faulkner began hoping that Hollywood would buy Pylon.” The quotation above might be edited in the following way: “Faulkner ]hoped[ that Hollywood would buy Pylon.” (ibid)

3. ]Sic[ The word sic indicates that the mistake the writer reproduces appears in the source and that the writer is aware of it.

EXAMPLE The professor stressed that “if your source makes a mistak [sic], you should copy the mistake because direct quotations are copied verbatim.” (