How To Handle Quotations and Paraphrases (MLA System)

1. Avoiding plagiarism is the goal of good documentation. You must know the difference between unintentional and intentional plagiarism -- misdemeanor vs. felony. The first is sloppy or incorrect documentation; the second is cheating, presenting someone else’s work as your own. See Goshgarian 275-277.

2. Define quotation & paraphrase

    a) Quotation = The original source’s idea in the original words exactly as you find them. No changes.  In fact, that is what quotation marks mean -- no changes; these are somebody else's words.

    b) Paraphrase = The original source’s idea in your words and sentence structure. You still need complete & correct attribution.

3. Do you remember the formula for the first sentence of summary?

    a)         In "Title," author verb that main point

Here is a formula for introducing a quotation or a paraphrase:

    b)         In "Title," author verb, "Quotation" (#).

    c)         In "Title," author verb that paraphrase (#).

That’s how it goes if you use a print source.

Here is an example, a quotation from our book:

    In "Don’t Forget the Smokers," C. Everett Koop asserts, "We can combine tobacco prevention initiatives with efforts to ensure that those who are hooked can obtain effective treatments" (98).

Here is an example, a paraphrase from our book:

    In "This One's for the Birds," Paul Finkelman argues that Boston Red Sox first baseman Doug Mienkiewicz is not entitled to keep the World Series ending baseball because the ball belongs to Major League Baseball, not a team or an individual player (24).

4. For an internet source, there are generally no clear page numbers or page breaks in the text. However, make a guess as to which page the quotation or paraphrase comes from and cite it. If you print out an article, those page numbers don’t count because they are not determined by the newspaper or magazine, but by the capacity of your computer & printer.

Use NC LIVE. If you search on yahoo or google or msn, etc. you will find lots of inappropriate website hits. Anybody can put whatever they want out there on the internet without editing or policing. Therefore, use NC LIVE because these articles have seen print publication first.

5. What if the author of the article you read is quoting somebody else and you want to quote that person?  For example, you read an article called "Cloning is Not for Primates," by Alfred Sloan.  On page 75, Sloan quotes Jennifer Perry, who says, "Monkeys are too much like us; cloning them is just too dangerous."  
You would present the quotation like this:  In "Cloning is Not for Primates," Jennifer Perry argues, "Monkeys are too much like us; cloning them is just too dangerous" (Sloan 75).
Now the reader knows to look for Sloan's name on the Works Cited page, not Perry's.

6. When and how should you use an ellipsis or brackets in a quotation?  This can be tricky, but here are a couple of examples.
   
    First, here is a complete quotation from page 265 of our book.  It's from an article about advertising called "Targeting a New World," by Joseph Turow:  "Clearly, the way the advertising industry talks about us is not the way we talk about ourselves.  Yet when we look at the advertisements that emerge from the cauldron of marketing strategies and strange terminology, we see pictures of our surroundings that we can understand, even recognize" (265).
    Here is how you might use an ellipsis to shorten the quotation:  In "Targeting a New World," Joseph Turow claims, "Clearly, the way the advertising industry talks about us is not the way we talk about ourselves.  Yet when we look at the advertisements . . .  we see pictures of our surroundings that we can understand, even recognize" (265).
    It is important to understand that if you take a phrase out of a quotation, the sentence that remains must be grammatically correct.

    Brackets are used to signify that you have changed part of a quotation in order to maintain context or for grammatical correctness.  In this example, the [T] signifies that I am starting the sentence in a different place than in the original, but a complete sentence quotation must start with a capital letter. 
    In "Targeting a New World," Joseph Turow asserts, "[T]he way the advertising industry talks about us is not the way we talk about ourselves" (265).
    Again, it is important to understand that if you quote only part of a sentence, that part should generally be an independent clause, meaning it can stand alone as a grammatically correct sentence.