Connecting Quotes

Connecting Quotations to Your Sentences

 

Caveat: Do not leave quotations unattached to your own sentences. Those are floating quotations.   Floating quotations are serious errors in ENGL 202. You must physically connect quotations to your sentences.

 

Wrong: The Misfit understands this frightening aspect of human nature. “‘She would of been a good woman . . . if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life’” (140).

Wrong: Incredibly, Sarty feels he should defend his father. “‘You done the best you could!’” (64)

The quotations above are unmoored, adrift.

 In this course, you may use three methods to connect short quotations to your own sentences:

  • A colon to connect a full sentence you write to a quotation.
  • A comma to connect a quotation to a dialog tag that you write.
  • Seamless run-in (morph) from your prose to quotation.

Do not invent other methods. Restrict yourself to these three methods.

 

Method One: Use a colon to connect a full sentence you write to a full sentence you quote.

  • A young concertgoer demolishes Miss Bill’s self-perception: “‘[Her fur] looks exactly like a fried whiting’” (14).
  • Bub experiences in that paragraph an intensely personal epiphany: “It was like nothing else in my life up to now” (131).

 

Method Two: Use a comma to connect quotations to dialog tags that you write. Examples of dialog tags include she says, he writes, she illustrates, he considers, and she thinks.

  • Understanding this frightening aspect of human nature, The Misfit remarks, “‘She would of been a good woman. . . if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life’” (140).
  • In ironic defense of his father, Sarty says, “‘You done the best you could!’” (64)

 

Method Three: Employ the sophisticated run-in technique so your prose morphs seamlessly into the quotation.

  • The Misfit knows the grandmother would have been nice all of her life if someone had been present to “‘shoot her every minute of her life’” (140).
  • Tragically, Sarty feels his father did “‘the best [he] could’” (64).
  • Miss Brill’s fragile world shatters when she learns that others think her precious fur looks “‘exactly like a fried whiting’” (14).

 

Some Further Caveats, Concerns, and Rules:

  1. Use brackets [ ] to show changes you make for the sake of grammatical tense and agreement.
  2. Always refer to fiction in the present tense.
  3. Do not quote an exchange of dialog (two people talking back and forth).
  4. Beware of embedding quotations in a sentence—at the front or in the middle. Instead, it s easier to place quotations at the ends of your sentences.
  5. Use ellipsis [. . .] to show you have deleted words.
  6. Do not begin or end quotation with ellipsis. Instead, use ellipsis inside of a quotation. Readers know there are words in the story before and after your quotation.
  7. Place a space between the dots in an ellipsis.
  8. If a quotation at the end of a sentence ends with a question mark or exclamation point, do not use a period after parentheses.
  9. Resist the temptation to place a comma, semi-colon, or colon in front of a run-in (morphed) quotation.
  10. Never use quotation marks for emphasis.
  11. Use internal quotation marks for quoting dialog, never for any other reason.
  12. When you follow the title of a short story or poem with a comma or period, place that punctuation inside of the quotation marks. When quoting the text, place commas and periods after the parenthesis.
  • Readers admire Faulkner’s “Barn Burning.”
  • When we consider the rhythms in Hopkins’s “Pied Beauty,” we stand back amazed.
  • Likely The Misfit is sincere when he says, “‘God never made a finer woman than my mother’” (89).
  • Faulkner even presents olfactory images: “He could smell the coffee from the room where they would presently eat” (54).

EXAMPLE PAPER BELOW (Some formatting issues as punishment for using Canvas. Particularly double spaces missing as well as hanging indent in Works Cited page.)

                                                                                                                                                                                   Doe 1

 

Jane Doe

Professor G. Tiffany

English 202

22 January 2014

 

It's About the Journey

            Like her contemporary William Faulkner, Eudora Welty (1909-2011) writes about the South in the years following the Civil War. Although she discusses controversial subjects, Welty infuses humor into her work that helps make her characters seem like real people. Additionally, Welty writes simply, using setting and character in ways that create vibrant works of art. In “A Worn Path,” Eudora Welty tells us that even an elderly black woman can possess bravery.

            The protagonist of the story, Phoenix Jackson, faces a harrowing journey. She must walk from her home in the mountains to town in the valley below to procure medicine for her grandson. The trip is a long one. The hazards predominate. It is mid-winter. Welty describes Jackson walking “with the balanced heaviness and lightness of a pendulum in a grandfather clock” (1). She seems unsure of her footing and uses a handmade cane to explore the ground before her. Her age is not mentioned, yet she is old enough to remember Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, and her eyes are “blue with age” (2), putting her in her 90's. Even a younger woman would find the trip dangerous. Does Phoenix have any doubt about the journey? Does she think about waiting for a ride from a neighbor or about the dangers she may encounter along the way?

           

                                                                                                                                                                          Doe 2

Phoenix has taken this path many times. The dirt of the trail is well-worn, narrow, and not without danger. There are animals hiding in thickets, for example, and overgrown brambles and trees reaching out to entangle themselves in her best dress and apron. Phoenix counters any anxiety she feels by talking to –and personifying–the trees and animals as she walks, admonishing them for trying to delay her: “'Thorns, you doing your appointed work'” (8). Welty's sense of humor appears when Phoenix must cross a creek by walking on a log laid across it and does so with her eyes closed, then proclaiming, “'I wasn't as old as I thought'” (14) once safely across.

            Welty's theme appears again when Phoenix bravely confronts the bigotry of the time. Welty describes this by creating a white hunter who encounters Phoenix on the path. He calls her Granny–something he would never call a white woman–and Phoenix refers to him as “sir” even though he is much younger than she. When he points his rifle at her, Phoenix stands firm, even though the hunter could easily murder her and her body not be discovered until spring. When asked if the weapon scares her, Phoenix replies, “‘No, sir. I seen plenty go off closer by, in my day, and for less than what I done'” (38). Mollified, the hunter tells her to stay at home where “‘nothing will happen to you’” (39) and leaves.

            Finally, the fact that her grandson is likely dead makes no difference to either the tale or Phoenix's heroism. Welly is ambiguous about his fate. A suspicious nurse asks, “'He isn't dead, is he?'” (86) The query provides a “flicker and then a flame of comprehension” (87) and Phoenix answers, “‘My little grandson, he is just the same'” (90). It is not the boy or the

medicine that matter, Welty says. The journey itself is important. Bravery comes by conquering the path. By repelling demons, some real, such as the hunter, and some imagined, like the

                                                                                                                                                                             Doe 3

scarecrow. The story is symbolic of the journey each of us makes through our lifetimes, and we can only hope to travel it with as much hope, joy, and determination as Phoenix Jackson does.

            There remains a bit of plot that, surely symbolic, is nevertheless hard to articulate. Welty never puts a passage in a story just for fluff. Every word has meaning. But the meaning and symbol hidden within paragraph 103 seems up for debate. After the nursing attendant presents Phoenix with a nickel that joins the nickel Phoenix captured from the hunter in the woods, Phoenix announces, “'I going to the store and buy my child a little windmill they sells, made out of paper. He going to find it hard to believe there such a thing in the world'” (103). In Phoenix's hardscrabble life, there is no room for extravagance. Even though the windmill is an inexpensive toy any child in town would enjoy for a summer, it represents a luxury Phoenix's grandson has never had. When every penny must go toward paying the bills and putting food on the table, Welty seems to be saying, the poor are truly the bravest among us.

            Eudora Welty has created a powerful character study in this short story. She speaks volumes about humanity without being preachy. She realizes that bravery often comes from love, as does the willingness to overcome anything to protect our children. “A Worn Path” has become one of my favorite short stories, and I will remember Phoenix fondly for a very long time.

 

 

                                                                                                                                                                                Doe 4

                                                                        Work Cited

Welty, Eudora. “A Worn Path.” Backpack Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, Drama, and Writing. Ed. X.. Kennedy and Dana Gioia. 4th ed. New York: Longman, 2012. 365-72. Print.