Some Suggestions for
Effective Use of
Quotation in English Papers
One of the
more useful skills for effective paper writing in literature courses is
the ability to quote text
effectively. English professors will, of course, have different
viewpoints
about how much quotation is useful in a student paper--you
should always sound out your teacher. But you'll find that many
of them will refer to the "sin of paraphrase"--that is, the tendency
on students' part to think that analysis of a text means putting
the author's
words into their own. By the sin of paraphrase, teachers
often mean the tendency to take a direct quotation, in other
words, and just "re-say" it in your own words. Unfortunately,
that "re-saying" process--some
of which is inevitable in interpretation--often means you run the risk
of
three kinds of errors in literature papers:
1.
First, that
you end up changing, diluting, or oversimplifying the meaning of the
author's
words, particularly if those words have poetic associations beyond a
single,
simple denotation.
2. Moreover, any time you "re-say" an author's words, you thereby lose
a
certain amount of textual evidence for your interpretation.
And
that, too, can hinder your analysis.
3. And third, you sometimes end up just summarizing a story rather than reading it as a text,
as words created by your author that expand upon,
reflect, or revise the story elements you're interpreting. In other
words, you just end up telling your literature professor the
plot--and that can be deadly.
So: what to do? Let's start with two techniques, and then
go
on to the most important third one, below.
1. First,
if often helps if you learn how to "pepper" your own summaries with
keywords
or phrases from the author, and/or text you're analyzing. So, for
instance, instead of writing this kind of summary--
Updike suggests Foster doesn't like
Ted very much, finding him arrogant and self-important.
--You might say,
instead:
Updike suggests that Foster finds Ted
artificial and pretentious,
noticing that his hair seems "mechanicially induced." Foster wonders
how
this "radiant brute" could be in such "tame" work as accounting (30).
I
call this
"peppering" because you're adding in keywords from your text into your
own summaries. Paradoxically, this actually allows you to sustain your own
argument or analysis more effectively while providing
evidence for your views more effectively. Moreover, you
allow your reader to intuit
figurative elements (like the implied comparison of Ted to things
artificial
or animalistic.) Most importantly,
you avoid talking about a character (here, like "Ted") as if
he were a real person whose personality traits you are evaluating.
Rather, you're keeping your eye on what your author implies about the
character he's created, or the narrator's view of that character.
2.
The second technique follows directly from the first: it isn't
a good
idea just to quote a sentence or phrase from a text, and then leave it
without commenting on it. Make sure you clearly include your
own voice reflecting
on the lines you quote. So, instead of:
Fitzgerald describes Charlie's sense
of time in many places. "The present was the
thing--work to do and someone to love" (397). The author also
shows
us that Charlie has changed since his earlier days of self-indulgence.
--You
might say,
instead:
Fitzgerald shows Charlie as trying to
overcome his earlier days
of self-indulgence, by telling himself that "[t]he present was the
thing--work
to do and someone to love" (397).
In
other words,
you integrate your author's phrasing into your own
evaluation,
rather than letting it seem un-commented upon.
3.
An
equally important skill, finally, is your ability to quote and then
decipher
block quotations taken directly from a text. These quotations can be
lines
of poetry, dialogue from a play, or long passages from works of fiction
or
nonfiction. Such passages not only provide evidence for your argument
or
reading; they also serve to demonstrate your ability to deal with
subtleties
in the text. Moreover, this technique preserves your own voice and the
thread
of your argument, allowing you necessary critical distance from your
material.
Again, you shouldn't let your passages "speak for themselves"; don't
assume that
just listing long passages in your paper shows you understand them.
Rather, use these passages to reach into a subtext. By avoiding a
restatement of the passage's plain sense, you can allow yourself, then,
to reach into areas of greater suggestiveness and meaning, or what is
sometimes called its "latent" meaning. Generally, such quotation
involves three steps: preparation; direct quotation; and "reading
back" into the quotation.
a.
In the first stage, you often prepare your reader for the
quotation by establishing its context or hinting at what main point the
quotation will support. Such preparation is usually followed by a colon
[:]).
b
Then,
you quote the text directly, indented 5 or10 spaces from the left
margin; you may, if you like, use ellipsis to cover more ground and
select the lines
you think important.
c.
Then comes
the hard part. After the quotation, especially if your preparation has
been brief, you "read back" into the quote, pointing out the key
words and phrases,
summarizing the latent ideas you discover there, pointing out the
imagery
that you find crucial, and so on. In some cases, what a writer
leaves
out is as important as what is explicitly said. This is not, I should
add,
paraphrase or re-stating: single sentence follow-ups, in fact, can be
deadly.
And you assume that your reader understands the "plain sense" or
"manifest
idea"--the most obvious things--about the passage. Again, the
rationale
behind this "reading back" is that you move your analysis beyond
plot summary, or discussing characters as if they are real people, and
thus
avoiding a "book report" feel to your paper. Instead, you're
looking
at the passage as a literary or artistic composition, or something with
a
"subtext" other analysts might not see.
Another
rationale behind my emphasis on quotation is the simple fact that,
quite often, you will see something different, something implied or
latent, in the block quotation
from what I see. And that's a good thing. So
think
of this step as if you were a teacher standing up next to a blackboard
with
a pointer-you "point" to the important words and elements that draw out
something different than what is manifest or apparent in the literal
paraphrase
of the passage. The following selection is meant to illustrate one way
such
quoting might look in a student paper.
_________________________________________________________
_
In the opening paragraphs
of "The Philosopher," Sherwood Anderson
introduces Doctor Parcival.
These preliminary descriptions focus on
details of the doctor's
attire, and then particularly on Parcival's
face and eyes:
He was
a large man with a drooping mouth covered by a yellow mustache. He
always
wore a dirty white waistcoat out of the pockets of which protruded a
number
of the kind of black cigars known as stogies. His teeth were black and
irregular
and there was something strange about his eyes. The lid of the left eye
twitched;
it fell down and snapped up; it was exactly as though the lid of the
eye
were a window shade and someone stood inside the doctor's head playing
with
a cord. (12)
In this passage, Anderson
emphasizes primary colors, elemental
contrasts like black
and white. He draws our eye to traits in this
doctor, notably his
lack of cleanliness, which cast doubt upon his
professional identity.
And although the "wink" of the eye partly
foreshadows the doctor's
fondness for amusing yet doubtful stories,
Anderson also uses the
"eye" to split the doctor's identity. By
comparing the eyelid
to a flapping window shade, Anderson suggests
not only that Parcival
has a secret he is letting out, almost
against his will--but that there is
"someone" else, a second
whimsical intelligence,
"playing" inside the man.
And
finally:
one thing you might notice about the analytical follow-up above is that
I use the author's name--in
this case, "Anderson"--to refer to the effects of the passage.
Different
professors will have different viewpoints on this technique: some will
prefer
to have you say "the text implies" rather than name the author, for
instance.
And you should always be consistent as to whether you're
describing
what a "narrator" says and what an author writes (some critics, in
fact,
insist that the voice we hear in the passage above is that of a
"narrator.")
For me, however, as long as you are consistent, naming the author is
usually
fine--since, in my view (as in many critics'), the "author" you are
naming
is, him- or herself, a "structural effect" of the prose you're
interpreting.
And the benefits of, as I will say repeatedly, "putting the author in
the
driver's seat"--making the author much like the director of a film, the
creator
of the text you're analyzing--often far outweigh the interpretive
risks.