Reading Lucy

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:
  1. start a new line
  2. indent it one inch on the left, not at all on the right.
  3. keep the spacing the same.
  4. if it’s prose paragraphs, use regular formatting
  5. 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

 

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