How to Integrate Quotations | Essay Writing Skills

Introduction

When you analyse a good story and offer an interpretation, it is vital that you refer directly to the text to support your own thoughts and ideas. Therefore, the ability to integrate quotations into your response is an important skill to develop if you want to get the top grade.

This guide will use Emily Dickinson’s “A Bird Came Down the Walk” to illustrate some of the different ways you can use quotations in an essay to reinforce your argments.

Basic Referencing

The following question is very typical of a comprehension question asked in junior school: What does the bird do when it lands on the path?

Without a quotation, the answer could simply read:

When the bird lands on the path, it ate a worm.

This response is effective because it uses the words of the question to lead into the correct summary. In order for the candidate to justify this answer, the most straightforward way to include a quotation is to simply add it to the end of the sentence:

When the bird lands on the path, it ate a worm: “he bit an Angle Worm in halves / And ate the fellow raw”.

You could also split the response into two sentences:

When the bird lands on the path, it ate a worm. We know this because the speaker says “he bit an Angle Worm in halves / And ate the fellow raw”.

Another approach would link the words of the question to the words of the text:

When the bird lands on the path, “he bit an Angle Worm in halves / And ate the fellow raw”.

These two examples certainly demonstrate that you have read and understood those particular lines of the poem, especially when you only need to summarise the story.

Punctuation

Please note, in these examples, the full stop is placed outside the closing quotation marks. This format is common in the United Kingdom.

More Precise Integration

In order to improve the precision of the answer, you could to separate the quotation into two parts:

When the bird lands on the path, “he bit an Angle Worm in halves” and then “ate the fellow raw”.

This demonstrates your understanding of the bird’s two actions, and is particularly important when you need to show that a number of things are happening in the text.

If the question is allocated two marks, you would probably need to have the two quotations.