“What do we want?”
“No dropped quotes!”
“When do we want it?”
“Now!”
This is a frequent exchange I have with my students. As an essay teacher, dropped quotes are one of the banes of my existence. A dropped quote is when a writer plops a quote into a paragraph with no context, attribution tag, or analysis. “They look like this, and they confuse readers.” As writers, we can never assume that our readers will follow our same train of thought; we have to guide them through every leap in our logic.
Here’s the anatomy of a well-integrated quotation:
Context, attribution tag, “Quotation,” analysis (author’s last name and page number).
Example: In The Westing Game, when Mrs. Wexler tours the potential new apartment, she thinks to herself, “Just wait until those so-called friends of hers with their classy houses see this place,” revealing her materialistic and shallow approach to life (Raskin 3).
In this example, the writer leads the reader through quote interpretation. The reader understands where in the story the quote comes from and what purpose the quote serves in the argument, which is to show Mrs. Wexler’s materialism.
We introduce this skill, and provide five scaffolded opportunities to practice and master this basic essential of MLA style in Introduction to Composition: The Essay, Volume 3. So let’s make our reader’s job as intuitive as possible.
So please, “No dropped quotes!”
~Claire S.