Using cited material

What does “cited” mean?

“Cited” means you have included information that tells your reader

where you got the information that you have just written or

spoken or shown.

What does a citation look like?

A citation can be a parentheses following the information you used:

Once a beautiful destination, “the coast of the smaller island is littered with debris and rotting jellyfish” (White 23).

A citation can be “embedded” in the text of the sentence:

Tom Norbert, a celebrated environmentalist for the Audubon Society, recently rejoiced that “the bird population of the Louisiana delta has made a full recovery from the BP oil spill.”

What needs to be cited?

Any information you have included in your paper that you

got from someplace else—a book, a website, an article, a novel, a picture, a graph, etc.

To demonstrate how well you understand the information you are including, you often put it in your own words—BUT the information still needs to be cited. Not to give credit to the source from which you got the information is PLAGIARISM. That is literary stealing.

People are often surprised to discover that the Anglo Saxons were about the same size as humans today. Only when poverty and disease became a way of life over generations did the Englishman morph into a being much shorter and more underdeveloped than we are today (Danzinger 15-20).

Often you want to copy the information word for word. The exact words of the author is a direct quote.

Direct quotes should be uniquely worded information or statistical information that you cannot put into your own words without losing meaning or impact.

ALL direct quotes must have a lead in. NO Exceptions!

A lead in introduces the quoted material. There are 2 kinds of lead ins:

1. Somebody says2. Sentence

Somebody says:

In one of his most famous speeches, John F. Kennedy said, `Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country’ (qtd. in Brokaw 244).

In today’s world, the term mudlark would conjure the image of a small brown bird, but according to Daniel Pool, a scholar of Victorian life, “In Victorian England mudlarks were six-to-twelve year old children who waded in the Thames River scrounging for bits of coal, rope, bones, and copper nails” (238).

Sentence lead in:

Today we complain about the pollution that automobiles spew into our city air, but nineteenth-century London had its own type of air pollution: “One hundred tons of horse manure dropped on the streets of London each day” (Pool 30).

Once king, Macbeth becomes more paranoid every day that the thanes are plotting against him: “There’s not a one of them but in his house / I keep a servant fee’d” (3.4.133-34).

“Somebody says” lead-ins need to identify the speaker and offer some credentials.

“Sentence” lead-ins use the direct quote to illustrate the point being made in the lead in.

According to Daniel Pool, a scholar of Victorian life, “In Victorian England mudlarks were six-to-twelve year old children who waded in the Thames River scrounging for bits of coal, rope, bones, and copper nails” (238).

Once king, Macbeth becomes more paranoid every day, fearing that the thanes are plotting against him: “There’s not a one of them but in his house / I keep a servant fee’d” (3.4.133-34).(the quote reveals that Macbeth has spies in the homes of his nobles because he doesn’t trust them)

Now you make up a direct quote and then create a

“somebody says” lead-in for it. Include a citation (either

parenthetical or embedded).

Now you make up a quote and create a “sentence” lead-in. Include a citation (either parenthetical or embedded).

A third way to include directly quoted material is to embed them (blend them) into your own sentences. Embedding quotes reads more smoothly and makes your writing more effective, more powerful than complete sentences copied from your source.

Embedded quotes:

In Victorian England a favorite betting venue included “how many rats a dog could kill within a given period of time” (Jones 78), causing one rat-pit proprietor to “keep two thousand rodents on the premises” (79).

In the mid-sixteenth century, the vast majority of England’s citizens remained largely uneducated, and even among the educated “science was mostly an abstract concept” (“The Black Plague” 365).

Sometimes you have to change the verb tense or some other grammatical issue in a direct quote in order for it to fit correctly into your paper:

Paine believed that “instead of consolidating society, [the English government] divided it. . .” (Egendorf 13). (In the original quote Egendorf used “they” because he had an antecedent in the previous sentence. To make the reader understand what “they” refers to, the writer replaces they with the English government.)

Rewrite the passage so that the quotes from William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet are embedded smoothly and correctly. Keep in mind that the quotes themselves are not to be changed, but their use in the sentence is.

A good quotation from Romeo and Juliet that shows the Prince is concerned with justice is that “some shall be pardoned and some shall be punished.” the quote comes from act 5, Scene 3, line 75

Rewrite the passage so that the quotes from William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet are embedded smoothly and correctly. Keep in mind that the quotes themselves are not to be changed, but their use in the sentence is.

The lines that introduce the famous Queen Mab speech are that Mercutio is fantasizing about the lady called “the fairies’ midwife.” He said that she is “no bigger than an agate stone.” When men fall asleep, she “travels over men’s noses.” (Act 1, Scene 4, lines 239-268)