<---

How to Quote

When you quote someone, you supply what a person said or wrote exactly as they said / wrote it. Let’s consider how to introduce quotations, how to work with longer quotations, and then discuss why you would quote.

Introducing Your Quotations

In introducing quotations, you will want to avoid a repetitive use of ‘says’, e.g. (X says A, while Y says B). This does not tend to be very informative and can be stylistically off-putting. Instead, diversify the introduction of quotations when appropriate, e.g. (X objects that ‘A’, but Y replies that ‘X’). Here are a few introductions commonly used in discourse.

writes, adds, argues, claims, observes, replies, notes, remarks, comments, objects, asserts, attests

It is my recommendation to keep things simple here. There may be a place for Galileo put to paper “…” or Galileo put in black and white “…” but these strike me as both odd and wordy.

Long Quotations

Typically, longer quotations (between 4 or more lines) and quotations that need particular emphasis should be formatted as block quotations. Unlike an inline quotation (a quotation that appears in the body of the text), a block quotation begins on a new line, are indented and (typically) do not make use of quotation marks. Here is an example:

Philosophy ought to imitate the successful sciences in its methods, so far as to proceed only from tangible premises which can be subjected to careful scrutiny, and to trust rather to the multitude and variety of its arguments than to the conclusiveness of any one. Its reasoning should not form a chain which is no stronger than its weakest link, but a cable whose fibres may be ever so slender, provided they are sufficiently numerous and intimately connected. (Peirce 1992:29)

Occasionally, it is desirable to omit part of the block quotation. When this occurs, make use of ellipses (three lower dots: …) to indicate that text has been removed. For example, we might want to shorten the above quote by not including part of the first sentence. We can do this using square braces containing an elipsis.

Philosophy ought to imitate the successful sciences in its methods, [...] and to trust rather to the multitude and variety of its arguments than to the conclusiveness of any one. Its reasoning should not form a chain which is no stronger than its weakest link, but a cable whose fibres may be ever so slender, provided they are sufficiently numerous and intimately connected (Peirce 1992:29).

The use of brackets around an ellipsis indicates that the ellipsis are not the author’s but inserted by you.

Why Quote

In general, you should try to avoid quoting and instead paraphrase and cite them instead. There are two reasons for this. First, by paraphrasing what another says, you ensure that your writing has a consistent style. This makes your writing easier to understand. Second, when someone says something, they say it in a context. When you quote them, you are putting what they say in a different context (the context of your paper). By paraphrasing, you can not only say what they said but also put it in the context of your work.

However, there are some exceptions to the above rule. You might consider quoting someone rather than paraphrasing them for a few reasons:

  1. You want to provide evidence that someone holds a position
  2. How they person expressed some idea (their wording) is memorable.
  3. The person expressed themselves in such a way that any attempt to paraphrase would distort what they meant (or lessen the impact of what they are saying).
  4. The person makes a point that you (1) agree with and so quoting them provides another way of expressing what you have been expressing or (2) diagree with and so quoting them provides another way of expressing a position that you have been articulating and criticizing.
  5. There is some dispute about the person meant by what they said and so paraphrasing might invite some disagreement
  6. Part of your analysis involves the words they used rather than the ideas they conveyed
  7. What someone said is very complex (or fruitful) and so you want to quote it in its entirety because you plan on further clarifying (or unpacking) what they said
  8. When part of what someone said has been taken out of context (or they are being quoted incorrectly) and it is necessary to provide the entirety of what they said to provide that context.

Let’s consider a few of the reasons above. In doing this, let’s use the following passage written by Charles S. Peirce:

Philosophy ought to imitate the successful sciences in its methods, so far as to proceed only from tangible premises which can be subjected to careful scrutiny, and to trust rather to the multitude and variety of its arguments than to the conclusiveness of any one. Its reasoning should not form a chain which is no stronger than its weakest link, but a cable whose fibres may be ever so slender, provided they are sufficiently numerous and intimately connected. (Peirce 1992:29)

First, we might want to quote someone to provide evidence that they hold a position. Suppose I want to argue that Peirce thought that the method of philosophy should not be more like the sciences in that it takes an experimental approach. I might argue for this claim by using part of the first line of the above passage:

Peirce (1992:29) wrote that "philosophy ought to imitate the successful sciences in its methods."

By quoting Peirce here I provide evidence that he holds a particular position.

Second, Peirce’s metaphor involving the chain and cable is (at least to my knowledge) not only original but also quite memorable. I might be able to paraphrase what Peirce says here but doing so would likely lessen its impact. For these reasons, I might provide the quote in its entirety.

Third, suppose an author holds the same position that Peirce does. The author, however, has articulated this position and argued for it in their own words. The author might provide the entire quotation above since it expresses what they have been saying except in a different way.

Fourth, suppose that many authors in the past have interpreted what Peirce means by this passage in different ways. They have offered paraphrases but these paraphrases are inconsistent. In order to resolve this inconsistency, I might quote the entire passage because I think paying attention to the words that Peirce uses in it is important for determining what he meant.

Fifth, suppose I want to take the ideas expressed in Peirce’s quotation and connect them to other ideas. For example, Peirce does not say who he is talking about in the above passage when he talks about those whose reasoning is like a chain. I might wish to quote the entire passage above because I plan on referring back to it when I cite various examples of people whose reasoning is like a chain.