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Integrating Quotations. Or… how to fanc-ify your writing!. What does it mean to “integrate” a quotation?. Integrating quotations means to “weave the author’s words into your own sentences. ”
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Integrating Quotations Or… how to fanc-ify your writing!
What does it mean to “integrate” a quotation? Integrating quotations means to “weave the author’s words into your own sentences.” It is the next level of sophistication in your writing, and it will help the flow of your essay when you need to use multiple—but not all—pieces of a quotation. Essentially it’s like manipulating another person’s words to create AND strengthen your argument. Impressed yet?
Up until now you have been used to introducing a quotation like so: In Into the Wild, Walt, Chris McCandless's dad, explains how stubborn his son was. He says, “but if you tried to coach him, to polish his skill, to bring out that final ten percent, a wall went up. He resisted instruction of any kind” (Krakauer 111). Nothing is wrong with this – it still gets the point across. But, look at how much more efficient (and sophisticated) integrating a quotation can be….
In Into the Wild, Walt, Chris McCandless's dad explains how stubborn his son was. He says, “if you tried to coach him, to polish his skill, to bring out that final ten percent, a wall went up. He resisted instruction of any kind” (Krakauer 111). vs In Into the Wild, Walt, Chris McCandless'sdad, emphasizes his son’s stubbornness, explaining that while Chris was naturally good at everything “if you tried to coach him, to polish his skill, to bring out that final ten percent, a wall went up. He resisted instruction of any kind” (Krakauer 111).
As long as the quotation is properly cited, you can pick and choose which pieces you want to be part of your own words. This saves a lot of time, space, and will pump up your writing wayyyy up. Plus, you look fancy!
Here’s another example: One day she even wore “An off-white dress so long it covered her shoes” (Spinelli 4). This is great except for one grammatical issue. Can you spot it?
When integrating quotations, you need to make sure that the sentence you are crafting still follows all the grammatical rules. In this case the capital “A” at beginning of the quotation needs to be lower case. One day she even wore “An off-white dress so long it covered her shoes” (Spinelli 4). The way you do this without plagiarizing is to note that you have made the change. The way you note this is to put brackets around the change, like so: One day she even wore “[a]n off-white dress so long it covered her shoes” (Spinelli 4).
