Limiting your use of quotations
Although it is tempting to insert many quotations in your paper and to use your own words only for connecting passages, do not quote excessively. In your academic writing, keep the emphasis on your ideas; use your own words to summarize and to paraphrase your sources and to explain your points. Sometimes, however, quotations can be the most effective way to integrate a source’s ideas.
when to use quotations
When language is especially vivid or expressive
When exact wording is needed for technical accuracy
When it is important to let the debaters of an issue explain their positions in their own words
When the words of an authority lend weight to an argument
When the language of a source is the topic of your discussion (as in an analysis or interpretation)
It is not always necessary to quote full sentences from a source. To reduce your reliance on the words of others, you can often integrate language from a source into your own sentence structure. (For the use of signal phrases in integrating quotations, see MLA-3b.)
Kizza and Ssanyu observe that technology in the workplace has been accompanied by “an array of problems that needed quick answers” such as electronic monitoring to prevent security breaches (4).
Using the ellipsis mark and brackets
Two useful marks of punctuation, the ellipsis mark and brackets, allow you to keep quoted material to a minimum and to integrate it smoothly into your text.
The ellipsis mark To condense a quoted passage, you can use the ellipsis mark (three periods, with spaces between) to indicate that you have left words out. What remains must be grammatically complete.
Lane acknowledges the legitimate reasons that many companies have for monitoring their employees’ online activities, particularly management’s concern about preventing “the theft of information that can be downloaded to a ...disk, e-mailed to oneself ..., or even posted to a Web page for the entire world to see” (12).
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The writer has omitted from the source the words floppy or Zip before disk and or a confederate after oneself.
On the rare occasions when you want to leave out one or more full sentences, use a period before the three ellipsis dots.
Charles Lewis, director of the Center for Public Integrity, points out that “by 1987, employers were administering nearly 2,000,000 polygraph tests a year to job applicants and employees.... Millions of workers were required to produce urine samples under observation for drug testing ...” (22).
Ordinarily, do not use an ellipsis mark at the beginning or at the end of a quotation. Your readers will understand that the quoted material is taken from a longer passage, so such marks are not necessary. The only exception occurs when you have dropped words at the end of the final quoted sentence. In such cases, put three ellipsis dots before the closing quotation mark and parenthetical reference, as in the previous example.
Make sure omissions and ellipsis marks do not distort the meaning of your source.
Brackets Brackets allow you to insert your own words into quoted material. You can insert words in brackets to clarify a confusing reference or to keep a sentence grammatical in your context. You also use brackets to indicate that you are changing a letter from capital to lowercase (or vice versa) to fit into your sentence.
Legal scholar Jay Kesan notes that “[a] decade ago, losses [from employees’ computer crimes] were already mounting to five billion dollars annually” (311).
This quotation began A decade ago ... in the source, so the writer indicated the change to lowercase with brackets and inserted words in brackets to clarify the meaning of losses.
To indicate an error such as a misspelling in a quotation, insert [sic], including the brackets, right after the error.
Johnson argues that “while online monitoring is often imagined as harmles [sic], the practice may well threaten employees’ rights to privacy” (14).
Setting off long quotations
When you quote more than four typed lines of prose or more than three lines of poetry, set off the quotation by indenting it one inch from the left margin.
Long quotations should be introduced by an informative sentence, usually followed by a colon. Quotation marks are unnecessary because the indented format tells readers that the passage is taken word-for-word from the source.
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Botan and Vorvoreanu examine the role of gender in company practices of electronic surveillance:
There has never been accurate documentation of the extent of gender differences in surveillance, but by the middle 1990s, estimates of the proportion of surveilled employees that were women ranged from 75% to 85%.... Ironically, this gender imbalance in workplace surveillance may be evening out today because advances in surveillance technology are making surveillance of traditionally male dominated fields, such as long-distance truck driving, cheap, easy, and frequently unobtrusive. (127)
Notice that at the end of an indented quotation the parenthetical citation goes outside the final mark of punctuation. (When a quotation is run into your text, the opposite is true. See the sample citations.)