Essential Essay Technique: Quoting

In English Literature essays, quoting is vital to getting a good grade. If you use quotes well, you’re guaranteed a good grade. Here are a few tips to make sure you quote properly:

Don’t misquote!!!
This sounds so simple, but if you change one little bit of a quote, you can claim your quotes are 100% accurate. Instead, use the tips below to help you avoid this.

Speech marks.
ESSENTIAL!!! No matter what you do, you must make it clear you are quoting something by putting it in speech marks. You should put the usual punctuation that you do for speech, e.g. the comma before you open the quotes but you may not want to put the first letter as a capital letter to make the sentence flow better.
Don’t put the whole line in - just use little bits.
You will get a higher mark if you show you can adapt language to suit your purpose. Don’t deliberately misquote, but leave out what you don’t want and write it yourself.

Example:

The whole line is "I told you I wanted to play."

Rather than writing: the boy said "I told you I wanted to play" you could write: the boy said he, "wanted to play". This shows you can quote selectively.

Square brackets.
These are used to explain something in the middle of the quote.

Example:

The whole line is "I told you I wanted to play."

If you were to write: the boy said he, "wanted to play" it may not make sense because you don’t know what he wanted to play, so you put a brief note in square brackets. You now get:

The boy said he, "wanted to play [football]."

Remember these notes must make sense, if someone reads you work aloud, they will read these brackets as well.
Omitting speech.
To make some sentences easier to understand, you can quote a long phrase, but leave out the unnecessary parts. When you do this, write three full stops ( … )in place of the parts you left out.

Example:

"The boy desperately wanted to play football."

You can quote this in an easy way by writing:

"The boy … wanted to play football."

This is a simple example, but this is a very useful technique as it shows people that you’ve left something out – if you’d just left it out you would have changed the quote.
Reported speech.
Remember to change speech into reported speech – not a technique but something to watch for so you don’t confuse people reading your work, especially the examiner.

The line, as it is written in the book is:

The boy said to her, "I told you so!"

When you write it, change the quote marks in the above line to single quote marks, and then use double quote marks to show where your quotes begin and end. You could write:

In the book the boy "said to her, ‘I told you so!’ "

Can you see the difference? The person reading your work now knows where you quotes are, and not where speech in the book is being used.