The ability to use a quote from a source to support your own ideas is crucial to a writer. Taking someone else’s ideas and building off of them or attempting to disprove what they say is something that all writers might have to do someday. In my own writing, it is absolutely something that I have had to do throughout English 110. In the beginning of the semester, I would often leave my quotes hanging. I would drop a quote into my paper, and only talk about it briefly before moving on to something else. The times that I did explain my quotes well early on, I didn’t do a good enough job tying my ideas in with the quote I pulled from my source. As I progressed through the semester, I learned from both class and the book “They Say I Say” the necessary parts of setting up a quote. Also, BARCLAY paragraph formatting was very useful to me. An example of where I use this is shown in my writing prompt 3, which can be found here. In this paper, specifically in the second paragraph, I show that I am able to take a quote and develop it into my own ideas. I attempt to sew the quote into the paper, so that it doesn’t feel like it is forced in there. Although direct quotes are the most common way to cite sources, they can still be cited a number of other ways, such as summary or paraphrase. I will often use this if I feel like the person I am taking from is saying too much to have only one quote taken from them. These are powerful to use because it allows me to condense what needs to come across to my reader, while also still giving credit to the author of the text.
