Integrate quotations from your interviews.

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Good profiles quote sources so readers can hear what people have to say in their own voices. As you write, choose quotations from your notes to reveal the style and character of the people you interviewed, and integrate these quotations smoothly into your sentences.

When you quote someone directly (rather than paraphrasing or summarizing), you’ll need to identify the speaker. The principal way to do so is with a speaker tag. You may rely on an all-purpose verb (such as says) or a more descriptive verb (such as yells out) to help readers imagine speakers’ attitudes and personal styles:

“Try this one,” he says. (Thompson, par. 7)

“Take me out to the”—and Toby yells out, “Banana store!” (Coyne, par. 21)

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You may also add a word or phrase to a speaker tag to describe the speaker or to reveal more about how, where, when, or why the speaker speaks:

“We’re in Ripley’s Believe It or Not, along with another funeral home whose owners’ names are Baggit and Sackit,” Howard told me, without cracking a smile. (Cable, par. 14)

Once, after being given this weak explanation, he said, “I wish I could have done something really bad, like my Mommy. So I could go to prison too and be with her.” (Coyne, par. 18)

In addition to being carefully introduced, quotations must be precisely punctuated. Fortunately, there are only two general rules:

  1. Enclose all quotations in quotation marks. These always come in pairs: one at the beginning, and one at the end of the quotation.
  2. Separate the quotation from its speaker tag with appropriate punctuation, usually a comma. But if you have more than one sentence (as in the last example above), be careful to punctuate the separate sentences properly.