Compare your experience at BHS with Jennifer Egan’s. What would you do if you went back to BHS on your own?
Jennifer Egan’s use of sources:
- Egan’s writing, followed by a quotation.
- Egan’s writing, a colon, and a quotation
- (the colon signals an example)
- Egan’s writing with a quotation directly included in the sentence
- a comma might be included within the quotation marks even if it’s not part of the quotation–it’s to make the sentence grammatical.
- commas and periods go inside the quotation marks, semicolons and colons don’t, question marks and exclamation points sometimes do. EXCEPT when a parenthetical citation follows
- How often can Lucy write to Alfred “when are you coming home?” before he gets bored?
- a list–quoted without quotation marks, gives us a sense of what it looked like on the page.
- uses a colon to set off a longer quotation as well
- block quotation rules:
- start a new line
- indent it one inch on the left, not at all on the right.
- keep the spacing the same.
- if it’s prose paragraphs, use regular formatting
- if it’s poetry or something that takes a particular form, maintain that form
- if you want to use only part of a passage, use an ellipsis to indicate that something is missing: “First it’s 4. . . then it’s 6…. You see, I’m a shipfitter and I’m making up some more kingposts and booms.”
- quotations in quotations: “double quotation marks” on the outside (beginning and end), and ‘single quotation marks’ inside for quoted material included in the passage.
- if a quotation includes an error, show you’re smart by including the mistake and then including [sic]
- if you need to change anything in the quotation to make it work grammatically or to clarify previously included information, use square brackets to indicate the change
Any time we include a quotation, we want to:
- introduce it
- quote it
- interpret it
- analyze it
- apply it to our argument
