Interpret complex quotations before you offer them - Quoting, paraphrasing, and summarizing sources - Writing your paper

Student's guide to writing college papers, Fourth edition - Kate L. Turabian 2010

Interpret complex quotations before you offer them
Quoting, paraphrasing, and summarizing sources
Writing your paper

By the time you add a quotation to your draft, you may have studied it so much that you think readers can't miss its relevance. But complex evidence never speaks for itself, especially not a long quotation, image, table or chart, and so on. So when you quote a passage that is long, difficult to understand, or written in complex language, you must speak for it by adding a sentence stating what you want your readers to get out of it.

You have already seen examples of quotations introduced by an introductory sentence:

If there is one thing that America should learn from the past, it's that nothing lasts forever: “The histories of the Fertile Crescent and China . . . hold a salutary lesson for the modern world: circumstances change, and past primacy is no guarantee of future primacy” (Diamond, 417).

Such introductory sentences tell readers how the writer wants them to understand the quotation that follows.

You may need even longer introductions when the relationship between the quotation and the claim it supports is not obvious. For example, it's hard to see how the quoted lines in this next passage support the claim:

When Hamlet comes upon his stepfather Claudius at prayer, he coolly and logically thinks about whether to kill him on the spot.claim

Now might I do it [kill him] pat, now [while] he is praying:

And now I'll do't; and so he goes to heaven;

And so am I reveng'd . . .

[But this] villain kills my father; and for that,

I, his sole son, do this same villain send to heaven.

Why, this is hire and salary, not revenge.evidence

Nothing in those lines specifically refers to Hamlet's cool logic. Compare this:

When Hamlet comes upon his stepfather Claudius at prayer, he logically analyzes whether to kill him on the spot.claim First he wants to kill Claudius immediately, but then he pauses to think: If he kills Claudius while he is praying, he sends his soul to heaven. But he wants Claudius damned to hell, so he coolly decides to kill him later:interpretive introduction

Now might I do it [kill him] pat, now he is praying:

And now I'll do't; and so he goes to heaven;

And so am I reveng'd . . .

[But this] villain kills my father; and for that,

I, his sole son, do this same villain send to heaven.

Why, this is hire and salary, not revenge.evidence

That kind of explanatory introduction is even more important when you present quantitative evidence in a table or figure (see 11.3.1).