Quote marks (“”) are used to designate direct quotes from sources, to identify a comment about a word, and to identify dialogue. [EDIT]
Placing double quote marks around material designates those words as original to some source, either another text or some comment spoken by someone. In the examples above in the discussion of commas, you have several examples of quotes with documentation in both APA and MLA.
Integrating quotes into your original writing involves the use of quote marks along with understanding the conventions of commas, periods, documentation, and capitalization. Note that if you need to make any changes or additions within a quoted passage, place the changes in brackets ([ ]); if you omit anything from the quote, identify the omitted material with an ellipsis (. . .). However, any changes made to quoted passages must honor the integrity of the meaning of those passages, and you must maintain grammatical integrity of both the quoted material and the entire text of your writing integrating that source. Here are passages using quoted material. Look closely at how the quotes are integrated; the first two examples use APA documentation, and the third and forth examples use MLA documentation:
Examples:
“There is no such thing as a culturally deprived kid,” argued Ellison (2003, p. 547). Here, a man of letters recognized something that contrasts with our assumptions today: Too often we attempt to address the educational problems of children from poverty with workshops, programs, and classroom practices that maintain a deficit view of those children and their lives. “Let’s not play these kids cheap; let’s find out what they have,” Ellison countered. “What do they have that is a strength?” (p. 548). For Ellison, who left college and gained his full education as a writer by reading and writing, the purpose of education was clear: “Education is a matter of building bridges, it seems to me” (p. 548). And why build a bridge to something that is broken, something that is lacking?—we might imagine him asking those who see children from poverty as incomplete, passively waiting for schools and teachers to fill in those gaps.
Ayers, in To Teach, argues, “Education will unfit anyone to be a slave. . . .Education tears down walls; training is all barbed wire” (p. 132).
My ideas for this article were first spurred several years ago by reading Weaver’s Teaching Grammar in Context. In that book, Weaver spends a few pages on the developmental stages of children’s ability to draw people. As most brain researchers believe, people do not reach levels of cognitive development at easily prescribed rates, but people often do follow the same sequence of development, though their performances of those levels may manifest themselves in erratic and conflicting ways. Weaver shows (see her Fig. 4.2, 61) the stages of a child’s drawing of people—which reveals conceptual leaps of understanding that the child exhibits through drawing. Children’s drawings of people reveal two important aspects of a child’s development of expression, as noted by Weaver: “[l]earners do not typically master something correctly all at once,” and “[s]omething learned may be temporarily not applied as the person is trying something else new” (60). One does not have to make too much of a leap to see the parallel with composing and the ability to write by hand: “These generalizations hold for emergent writers as well as for emergent artists, and for adults as well as children,” Weaver explains (62).
Jane Kiel offers a synthesis of what we know about how students learn and, more importantly for this discussion, how students acquire language. Her conclusion drawn from how we deal with reading and writing, vocabulary, spelling, and the many and varied aspects we lump under language arts instruction serves well to focus us here:
Given the vast amount of language [students] have already learned on their own before starting school, this fact [—very little is learned through direct instruction—] should not surprise us. Language is learned when we are exposed to, and engaged with, meaningful language, not because we are taught. So, as Frank Smith (1994) and many others have said, maybe we should spend more instructional time not on instruction, but on giving the students a chance to interact with language in a meaningful way: through reading and writing for an audience. It is through such contact that true language learning takes place. (15)*
*On-line the formatting is lost; this last section of text must be left justified a full paragraph indention as a signal of it being a direct quote.
(2.SQM) Single Quote Marks (‘’) are used to identify quoted material already enclosed within quote marks.
Example:
As an adult, Loyd is a train engineer, and in Chapter 23, he is telling Codi about a recent and difficult maneuver he has conducted with a particularly long and heavy train. “’Nobody can just tell you how to do that hill?’” Codi asks Loyd—who replies, “’No, because every train’s different on every hill. Every single run is a brand-new job. You have to learn the feel of it’” (295).
“‘Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught,’” Steven Pinker—early in his argument about the language instinct—quotes from Oscar Wilde (19).
(2.P) In academic and scholarly writing, writers often quote words and lines from poetry. Quoting and documenting poetry have a few conventions unique to poetry. When you quote from a poem and the quote includes words from more than one line, but not more than two, show the break in the line with a slash (/); if you quote more than two lines, set the lines off and maintain the line formation and all other aspects of formatting in the original. Document the line numbers, not the page number, when quoting poetry.
Examples:
In her poem, Atwood’s wordplay with “spell,” “spelling,” and “spells” is paralleled later in the poem with her wordplay with “name first” and “first naming” (ll. 4, 5, 6, 39, 40).
The speaker in Atwood’s poem emphasizes her focus near the middle of the poem: “A word after a word/ after a word is power” (ll. 24-25).
One of Atwood’s most effective poems, most shocking poems, is only four lines long:
you fit into me
like a hook into an eye
a fish hook
an open eye. (ll. 1-4)*
*On-line the formating is lost; this last section of text is left justified a full paragraph indention as a signal of it being a direct quote.
(2.F) Quoted passages from fiction are formatted and documented in the same ways as quoting from any prose.
(2.D) Quoting from drama requires that you follow the conventions of quoting from prose if the drama is in prose, but to follow the conventions of quoting poetry is in verse (such as Shakespeare). Documentation usually requires that you identify the page number in prose drama, but the act, scene, and line(s) in verse plays (see the example for documenting a verse play).
Example:
Macbeth proclaims, “I have lived long enough. My way of life/ Is fall’n into the sear, the yellow leaf” (5.3.22-3).
• Quotes of passages considered too long to keep within the flow of your normal sentences should be set off, following the conventions of the style sheet you are using, but with no quote marks used around the set-off sentences; the first example is in APA format and the second, MLA.
Example:
Identifying the social impact of poverty on students is potentially perpetuating deficit assumptions also, as noted by Bomer, Dworin, May and Semingson (2008):
There are two basic varieties of deficit thinking. One is genetic, where poor performance of students from low-income households is held to be transmitted through biology. The other perspective, and the one that Payne advocates, is the culture of poverty view, where the self-sustaining cultural models of the poor are thought to be carriers of deficits like school failure and intergenerational poverty. In this variety of deficit thinking, the family and home environmental contexts are singled out as the transmitters of pathology (Valencia, 1997).
Jane Kiel offers a synthesis of what we know about how students learn and, more importantly for this discussion, how students acquire language. Her conclusion drawn from how we deal with reading and writing, vocabulary, spelling, and the many and varied aspects we lump under language arts instruction serves well to focus us here:
Given the vast amount of language [students] have already learned on their own before starting school, this fact [—very little is learned through direct instruction—] should not surprise us. Language is learned when we are exposed to, and engaged with, meaningful language, not because we are taught. So, as Frank Smith (1994) and many others have said, maybe we should spend more instructional time not on instruction, but on giving the students a chance to interact with language in a meaningful way: through reading and writing for an audience. It is through such contact that true language learning takes place. (15)*
*On-line the formating is lost; this last section of text is left justified a full paragraph indention as a signal of it being a direct quote.
• Place quote marks around words you are referring to, not using, in the flow of your sentence. (Some prefer italics to quote marks for referring to a word.)
Example:
Students often asked if they could use “I,” “it,” and “you.”
An on-line reference for using quote marks can be found here:
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/577/01/
