Plagiarism

How to Quote

When you quote, you are transcribing (copying) the writer’s words exactly as they are written and accurately. Quoting should not be used just because you find it hard to paraphrase a writer’s material - too many quotes can be just as bad as plagiarising. Quoting does work well, however, when the writer has made his or her point so articulately that your point is strengthened by including the quotation.

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Quotations must be introduced. You can introduce your quotation by using the writer’s name, and then making sure you enclose all the quoted material (whether it's a short phase or a full sentence or more) within quotation marks. If you are including the page numbers for your quotation, they should stand outside the quotation marks but inside the full stop which follows it (or can be added as a citation).

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Here are a few examples of quoting:

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Karen Elizabeth Gordon writes in her introduction to The Well-Tempered Sentence, "However frenzied or disarrayed or complicated your thoughts may be, punctuation tempers them and sends signals to your reader about how to take them in" (ix).

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Gordon (1993) says of the exclamation point, "What a wild, reckless, willful invention! How could we possibly live without it! Who needs words when we have this flasher!" (p. 1).

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Karen Elizabeth Gordon thinks of the comma as "a delicate kink in time, a pause within a sentence, a chance to catch your breath."1

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For the third example above, you would need to include a footnote at the bottom of the page, which might look like this:

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1. Karen Elizabeth Gordon, The New Well-Tempered Sentence: A Punctuation Handbook for the Innocent, the Eager, and the Doomed (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1993), 21.]

It is important to use quotes only if they help to emphasise the points you are trying to make, and never to use quotes because you are unwilling to spend a bit of time paraphrasing the material instead.

The exception for this may be if you are writing a literature paper (for English Language and/or Literature, or for Modern Foreign Language studies, for example). Here, you will be expected to include quotes in order to analyse them as part of your essay or coursework. In these cases, it is important to think carefully about the quotes you use so that you are making the most important points, rather than just filling up your essay with quotes that you then struggle to analyse and evaluate effectively. Talk to those subject teaches if you are unsure how many quotes you should be using. 

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This page is adapted from: http://www.wcu.edu/WebFiles/PDFs/Avoiding-Plagiarism-2014.pdf