Integrating Your Textual Evidence

Since the text is your best proof to convince an audience that your thesis has merit, you should practice the best habits of borrowing to allow your evidence to do its job. Here are a couple of principles to help guide you about how and when to borrow.

I. Make sure your readers see the connection between your commentary or analysis, and the passage that supports or illustrates your point.

For example, instead of this:

Hazel is hurt by her children's words. "I don't answer cause I'll cry. Terrible thing when your own children talk to you like that" (5).

Connect the two passages in one of two ways:

Hazel is hurt by her children's words: "I don't answer cause I'll cry. Terrible thing when your own children talk to you like that" (5).

In this case, just using a colon instead of a period allows readers to see how the quote is actually an illustration for the declarative statement that came before. Or, you could weave the quote into your own syntax:

Hazel is hurt by her children's words so much so that she says, "I don't answer cause I'll cry. Terrible thing when your own children talk to you like that" (5).

II. Only borrow what is absolutely necessary for any quotation.

The tendency among writers of literary critiques is to default to sentence-length passages since they can (they think) avoid misrepresenting the passage. But that's inefficient and shouldn't be done.

Instead of a bulky quote like this:

Jewel felt that she needed to find out who she really was: "If I can just locate the--she searched  for 'geological' and that took some time--geological stairway, I might be able to get deep down, landing by landing, layer by layer, uncovering the layers of secrets stashed away in mothballs that won't stay folded, layers and layers down  to the nerve-lined pit of black to dig for richness with my fingers and find a someone there who's been rummaging through the trunks and caves and knows all the terrible hurts that haven't cracked through to the surface and been revealed in the close-ups damning her..." (108).

Use something less bulky by quoting just the most important passages together:

Jewel felt that she needed to find out who she really was: "If I can just locate the...geological stairway, I might be able to get deep down...uncovering the layers of secrets stashed away...and find a someone there..." (108).

In all of your quotations from the stories, you simply need to document just the page number of the quote. In each of the examples above, when the quotation ends, parentheses follow with the page number inside (no "p." or "pg." or "page" is included), followed by a period to end the sentence. Please follow this guideline in all your borrowing for this paper!