Appendix C: Integrating Source Evidence into Your Writing

Writing in an academic context often entails engaging with the words and ideas of other authors. Therefore, being able to correctly and fluently incorporate and engage with other writers’ words and ideas in your own writing is a critical academic skill. There are three main ways to integrate evidence from sources into your writing: quoting, paraphrasing, and summarizing. Each form requires a citation because you are using another person’s words and/or ideas. Even if you do not quote directly, but paraphrase source content and express it in your own words, you still must give credit to the original authors for their ideas.  Similarly, if you quote someone who says something that is “common knowledge,” you still must cite this quotation, as you are using their sentences structure, organizational logic, and/or syntax.

Integrating Quotations

WHY: Using direct quotations in your argument has several benefits:

• Integrating quotations provide direct evidence from reliable sources to support your argument.
• Using the words of credible sources conveys your credibility by showing you have done research into the area you are writing about and consulted relevant and authoritative sources.
• Selecting effective quotations illustrates that you can extract the important aspects of the information and use them effectively in your own argument.

WHEN: Be careful not to over-quote.  Quotations should be used sparingly because too many quotations can interfere with the flow of ideas and make it seem like you don’t have ideas of your own. Paraphrasing can be more effective in some cases.

So when should you use quotations?

• If the language of the original source uses the best possible phrasing or imagery, and no paraphrase or summary could be as effective; or
• If the use of language in the quotation is itself the focus of your analysis (e.g., if you are analyzing the author’s use of a particular image, metaphor, or other rhetorical strategy).

How to Integrate Quotations Correctly

Integrating quotations into your writing happens on two levels:  argumentative and grammatical. At the argument level, the quotation is being used to illustrate or support a point that you have made, and you will follow it with some analysis, explanation, comment, or interpretation that ties that quote to your argument. Never quote and run: don’t leave your reader to determine the relevance of the quotation. A quotation, statistic or bit of data cannot speak for itself; you must provide context and an explanation for quotations you use.  Essentially, you should create a “quotation sandwich” (see Figure C-1). Remember the acronym I.C.E. → Introduce – Cite – Explain.

The second level of integration is grammatical. This involves integrating the quotation into your own sentences so that it flows smoothly and fits logically and syntactically. There are three main methods to integrate quotations grammatically:

1. Seamless Integration Method: embed the quoted words as if they were an organic part of your sentence (if you read the sentence aloud, your listeners would not know there was a quotation).
2. Signal Phrase Method: use a signal phrase (Author + Verb) to introduce the quotation, clearly indicating that the quotation comes from a specific source
3. Colon Method: introduce the quotation with a complete sentence ending in a colon.

Consider the following opening sentence (and famous comma splice) from A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens, as an example:

1. Seamless Integration: embed the quotation, or excerpts from the quotation, as a seamless part of your sentence

Charles Dickens begins his novel with the paradoxical observation that the eighteenth century was both “the best of times” and “the worst of times” [1].

2. Signal Phrase: introduce the author and then the quote using a signal verb (scroll down to see a list of common verbs that signal you are about to quote someone)

Describing the eighteenth century, Charles Dickens observes, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” [1].

3. Colon: if your own introductory words form a complete sentence, you can use a colon to introduce and set off the quotation. This can give the quotation added emphasis.

Dickens defines the eighteenth century as a time of paradox: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” [1].

The eighteenth century was a time of paradox: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” [1].

Editing Quotations

When you use quotation marks around material, this indicates that you have used the exact words of the original author. However, sometimes the text you want to quote will not fit grammatically or clearly into your sentence without making some changes. Perhaps you need to replace a pronoun in the quote with the actual noun to make the context clear, or perhaps the verb tense does not fit. There are two key ways to edit a quotation to make it fit grammatically with your own sentence:

• Use square brackets: to reflect changes or additions to a quote, place square brackets around any words that have been changed or added.
• Use ellipses (3 dots): to show that some text has been removed, use the ellipses. Three dots indicate that some words have been removed from the sentence; 4 dots indicate that a substantial amount of text has been deleted, including the period at the end of a sentence.

You are allowed to change the original words, to shorten the quoted material or integrate material grammatically, but only if you signal those changes appropriately with square brackets or ellipses:

Example 1:  Petroski observed that “[e]ngineers are always striving for success, but failure is seldom far from their minds” [3; p. 175].

Example 2:  Petroski recounts the story of a large bridge that was constructed at the beginning of the twentieth century in Quebec, saying that “by the time [it was done], in 1917, almost ninety construction workers [were] killed in the course of building the $25 million structure” [3; p. 175].

Example 3:  “Planners expected that when completed the … bridge would set a world record for long-span bridges of all types” [3; p. 175].

Integrating Paraphrases and Summaries

Instead of using direct quotations, you can paraphrase and summarize evidence to integrate it into your argument more succinctly. Both paraphrase and summary requires you to read the source carefully, understand it, and then rewrite the idea in your own words. Using these forms of integration demonstrates your understanding of the source, because rephrasing requires a good grasp of the core ideas. Paraphrasing and summarizing also makes integrating someone else’s ideas into your own sentences and paragraphs a little easier, as you do not have to merge grammar and writing style—you don’t need to worry about grammatical integration of someone else’s language.

Paraphrase and summary differ in that paraphrases focuses on a smaller, specific section of text that when paraphrased may be close to the length of the original. Summaries, on the other hand, are condensations of large chunks of text, so they are much shorter than the original and capture only the main ideas.