Don’t Float Your Quotes! H ow to use blended quotations effectively in your writing

Effectively incorporating quotations into writing can be tough! Sometimes writers leave quotations “floating” or unattached to a sentence which causes confusion and usually results in a loss of meaning.

An effective way to use quotations is to blend them into your sentences… One way to support a key idea in your analysis is to include words and phrases from a piece of literature. These words and phrases (or quotations) do NOT have to be dialogue from a character.

“Swimming may have seemed a superfluous skill” to others who watched the lessons, but Gomez felt she had learned an invaluable life secret. …at the beginning

Gomez realizes that her grandmother taught her not only how to swim but that she should be “proud of [her] large body” and “African hair,” and this lesson has allowed her to gain “control over [her] own life.” Making her a strong independent woman. …in the middle

Gomez understood years later why her ancestors never learned to swim when she visited “West Africa and learned of the poisonous, spiny fish that inhabit most of the coastal waters.” …and at the end

When you blend a quotation into a sentence, be sure that the quoted material fits grammatically into the sentence. For example, be sure that what you end up with is a complete sentence and not a sentence fragment.

“The sea,” she learned, “a fearful place” for her African ancestors. What’s wrong with this sentence? It’s missing a VERB! The sentence should be written as… “The sea,” she learned, was “a fearful place” for her African ancestors.

Blended Quotation Practice For each sentence below, blend the quotation and the sentence on your own paper. You do not have to use all the words in a quotation, but you should pick out the KEY words and phrases that emphasize the point you are trying to make. MAKE SURE YOUR SENTENCE IS A COMPLETE SENTENCE! 1.SentencePoe uses sensory details to create a feeling of terror. Quotation“His room was as black as pitch with the thick darkness….”

2.Sentence Edgar Allan Poe uses comparisons for description. Quotation“old man’s heart” and “sound, such as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton.” 3.SentenceIn “The Tell-Tale Heart,” Poe immediately establishes the narrator as troubled. Quotation“nervous—very, very dreadfully nervous”