QUOTE QUOTE WEAVINGWEAVING

Our goal is to weave quotes (or, better yet, quote fragments) into a single sentence.

WEAVE only what you need from a quote into your own sentence. The star of the writing is YOU and YOUR THINKING. You don’t need to use an entire long quote.

Use Only What You NeedI want to write a sentence about the narrator’s inability to communicate with his wife and parents.

Original Quote from “Three Soldiers”

I should be there, helping them decide. My wife and my parents do their best to make Christmas dinner conversation around my silence. An hour ago, I was yelling at Angie for turning on the damn news. My father, carving, won’t meet my eyes. He says, “White meat, or dark?”

Use Only What You NeedI want to write a sentence about the narrator’s inability to communicate with his wife and parents.

Original Quote from “Three Soldiers”

I should be there, helping them decide. My wife and my parents do their best to make Christmas dinner conversation around my silence. An hour ago, I was yelling at Angie for turning on the damn news. My father, carving, won’t meet my eyes. He says, “White meat, or dark?”

Dumping:By the end of the story, the narrator is incapable of basic communication with his own family members. “My wife and parents do their best to make Christmas dinner conversation around my silence. An hour ago, I was yelling at Angie…”

Weaving:By the end of the story, when his wife and parents “do their best to make Christmas dinner conversation around [his] silence,” it’s evident that the narrator is now incapable of basic communication with his own family members.

Weave Don’t Dump

Besides being dumped, notice how the switch to First Person POV is confusing for the reader.

Notice how the quote has been woven into the sentence. It’s not just hanging out by itself like in the example above. Also the POV problem is fixed.

The Turney Test: Look at the sentence in which you’ve woven a quote. If you were to eliminate the quotation marks, would your sentence sound like a normal sentence, free of run-ons and/or confusion?

To weave properly, do the “Turney” Test

Wrong

By the end of the story, “my wife and my parents do their best to make Christmas dinner conversation around my silence,” it is evident that the narrator is now incapable of basic communication with his own family members.

Wrong

By the end of the story, my wife and my parents do their best to make Christmas dinner conversation around my silence, it is evident that the narrator is now incapable of basic communication with his own family members.

Correct

By the end of the story, when his wife and parents “do their best to make Christmas dinner conversation around [his] silence,” it’s evident that the narrator is now incapable of basic communication with his own family members (Rogers 5).

First time you use a quote from a writer, use the last name. After that, when using only one source, you just need the page number. Notice that the period for the sentence goes after the citation.

Evidence from “Three Soldiers”

I didn’t have an answer.

Although confident when answering questions about daily routines, when one of his soldiers is dying, the sergeant struggles with the discomfort of needing to lead when he “[doesn’t] have an answer” (Rogers 1).

Use brackets [ ] to change a pronoun or verb tense to make the quote work grammatically in your sentence. However, you cannot alter the author’s word choice or intent.

When writing about literature, we want to use the present tense.

The Highlight Test = YOU = AUTHOR

By the end of the story, when his wife and parents “do their best to make Christmas dinner conversation around [his] silence,” it’s evident that the narrator is now incapable of basic communication with his own family members.

The goal—there should be more of your writing than the author’s!

Weave the quote fragment with CONTEXT

When we use a quote, we often need to make sure the reader is clear about…

•Who is saying, thinking, or doing this?

•What has just happened?

•When is it? (beginning, middle, end?)

•Why is the character saying or thinking this?

•Where is this occurring?