Quoting

If you need some clarification about citing and quoting primary sources (the books on the list) and secondary sources (the scholarly texts that analyse these books), here are some examples that I made up for my workshop on the Art of quoting.

Mr. Bennet, a character study

Primary source: Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice

Direct quotation
Austen’s omniscient narrator closes the first chapter with a succinct and dismissive description of both of Elizabeth’s parents, describing her father as follows: “Mr. Bennet was so odd a mixture of quick parts, sarcastic humour, reserve, and caprice, that the experience of three and twenty years had been insufficient to make his wife understand his character” (45).

Integrated direct quotation
Mr. Bennet was “so odd a mixture of quick parts, sarcastic humour, reserve, and caprice” (Austen 45) that, instead of deploring his heir’s foolishness, he encouraged him to demonstrate it for his own enjoyment (Austen 102).

Paraphrase of a primary source
Mr. Bennet, who loved to laugh at others, looked forward to meeting his heir because he suspected him of being a fool, and therefore a source of amusement (Austen 99).

Secondary sources (How the scholars perceive Mr. Bennet)

Direct quotation of a secondary source
(Introduce the author in full in the text the first time, then simply put her/his name in the in-text citation)
In Jane Austen, Carol Shields concludes that Mr. Bennet “is seen on close textual inspection to be foolish in his own particularly fastidious and reluctant manner” (17-18).

Direct quotation of a secondary source already introduced
“[T]here is the delightfully cynical Mr. Bennet, who, having made an error of judgment in the major social fact, marriage, has allowed himself to lapse into a complete slothfulness of his own kind, who, in a major moral crisis as in the most mundane matters, is either unable or unwilling to be of use” (Schorer xviii-xix).

Integrated direct quotation of a secondary source appearing for the first time
As Kenneth Moler notes in Pride and Prejudice: A Study in Artistic Economy, the reader admires Mr. Bennet for his intelligence and wit but is also “repelled by his laziness, cynicism, and lack of responsibility as a father, husband, and landowner” (6).

Paraphrase from a secondary source already introduced
While readers may admire Mr. Bennet’s intelligence and wit, they must also be appalled by his refusal to assume his responsibilities (Moler 6).

Integrating several secondary sources at once
While some may find Mr. Bennet “delightfully cynical” (Schorer xvii), and others perceive him as foolish “in his own particular fastidious and reluctant manner” (Shields 18), all must condemn him for his very real neglect of his responsibilities to his family and land (Moler 6).