32 In-text references: quoting sources

General

Occasionally, you may want to quote the precise words of another author in your work.

• Quote selectively. There must be a good reason for using quotes as the emphasis should be on working with other people’s ideas, not on reproducing their words. Your piece of work should be the synthesis of information from sources, expressed in your words.
• Provide a context. Work with your quotations. Not only provide the author but point out what is interesting or significant about them. Whenever possible try to embed them into your own sentences, using a particularly striking or relevant part of the original source
• If you use short quotations, you need the author’s surname, year of publication, page number and quotation marks.

• Longer quotations should be indented as a separate paragraph with no quotation marks.

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it is torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion (Eliot, 1920 cited in Pecorari, 2103, p. 60).

• Omitting words: Use (…) to indicate where you omitted words. Your omission must not change the meaning, and the sentence remains grammatically correct.
• Inserting words: You might have to insert words to clarify meaning. Use square brackets […] around your inserted text.

As explained before, there are two principles of quoting somebody’s work: central reporting, non-central reporting:

• According to Pecorari (2013, p.13) “quote”./According to Pecorari (2013) “quote” (p.71).

or

• “Quote” (Pecorari, 2013, p. 71).