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How To Use Quotations in Your Writing

How to Add Quotes to Your Writing

Quotations in writing gives added weight to the points you’re making, because you can cite an expert or famous person whose quote directly correlates to your point. The added emphasis quotations make in the body of an article or essay make it almost compulsory for someone writing such compositions to use quotes. Read through most an article in the newspaper and you’ll see the news piece spiked with quotes from eyewitnesses, authorities and experts on the case.

To prepare students to use quotes and citations later in life, many teachers require their students to cite a certain number of quotations in their essays and term papers. Knowing when to use quotations in your writing and how to use those quotations is important to pass your English and history courses, if you never write an article for a publication in your life.

1. Add Quotations in Small Numbers

Don’t put too many quotations into your writing. Most terms papers call for 2 to 3 citations and that’s about the limit of what you need in an article-sized composition. If you have too many quotes inside your article, you won’t have time to make your argument and relate the background information key to your article.

2. Use Quotes To Add Emphasis

Citations shouldn’t make your argument for you, but should enhance and emphasize the points you’re making. A good quote drives home what you’ve been writing about in the last few paragraphs, adding the weight of some expert, eyewitness, authority or famous person to your own exposition.

3. Quotations at the Beginning or End

You can add quotations at the beginning of an article to set the tone for the entire composition. This quotation should directly invoke the theme of your article. Don’t choose a quotation simply because it sounds good. The quote should have a direct meaning and set the tone for the rest of your writing.

Less commonly, you’ll place a quote at the very end of your essay. This is supposed to leave the reader with a final thought that summarizes your paper or leaves a question in the mind of the reader that they should ponder after they’ve finished reading. The final words in a written piece should linger with a reader, but if you don’t place the right quotation at the end of your essay, it’s going to seem like you have an unfinished work.

4. Witty or Funny Quotes Can Be Effective

A witty, funny or sarcastic quote can be highly effective in making an argument, if the wit of the speaker comes through the quote. Also, the witticism has to directly relate to the subject of the article and needs to serve as a punchline to what you’re been writing about for the paragraphs above. If you place a funny quote in the middle of a serious piece of writing, this can make for a strange transition, though.

5. Quotes in Online Articles Should Be Rare

Quotations should be relatively rare in Internet articles. Unless you’re writing a long essay, the use of too many quotes will hurt your keyword density. Also, your aren’t going to have a whole lot of original content on that page. Too much duplicate content and you might get points off in the search engines for having the same words in the same order as other websites.

So remember, quotations in your writing are meant to enhance what you already write. Don’t make quotations the article itself.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 30th, 2009 at 2:57 pm and is filed under How To Guides, Quotes, Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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