8.2: Incorporating Quotations

Why Should You Integrate Quotations into Your Technical Writing?

Using direct quotations in your technical writing has several benefits:

• It provides direct evidence from reliable sources to support your work.
• It conveys your credibility by showing you have consulted relevant and authoritative sources.
• It illustrates that you can extract the important/relevant content from a source and use it effectively in your writing.

However, be careful not to over-quote. Quotations should be used sparingly because too many quotations can interfere with the flow of ideas and make it seem like you don’t have ideas of your own. Paraphrasing can be more effective in some cases.

When and How Should You Use Quotations?

You should use a quotation in your technical writing

• if the language of the original source uses the best possible phrasing, and no paraphrase or summary could be as effective;
• if the terminology of the quoted content cannot be paraphrased effectively (e.g., in the case of content that includes stats, scientific terms, etc);
• if the content in the quotation itself is the focus of your analysis or commentary.

Here are some tips for quoting effectively:

Tip #1: Don’t Quote and Run

When a quotation is used to illustrate or support a point that you have made in, for example, a technical report, you need to follow it with some analysis, explanation, comment, or interpretation about the quotation’s relevance. Never quote and run: don’t leave your reader to determine the relevance on their own. A quotation does not speak for itself; you must provide context and an explanation for quotations you use.

Tip #2: Integrate Correctly

It’s important to integrate a quotation correctly into your technical communications. The quotation should flow smoothly and fit both logically and syntactically. There are three main methods to integrate quotations grammatically:

Tip #3: Edit When Necessary

When you use quotation marks around material, this indicates that you have used the exact words of the original author. However, sometimes the text you want to quote will not fit grammatically or clearly into your sentence without making some changes. Perhaps you need to replace a pronoun in the quote with the actual noun to make the context clear, or perhaps the verb tense does not fit. There are two key ways to edit a quotation to make it fit grammatically with your own sentence:

• Use square brackets: To reflect changes or additions to a quote, place square brackets around any words that you have changed or added.
• Use ellipses (three dots): To show that some text has been removed, use ellipses; they indicate that some words have been removed from the sentence.