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The following paragraph is from a student’s analysis of the relationship between two characters in Woolf’s To the Lighthouse.

How do I use literary quotations? General guidelines

And don’t quote just for the sake of quoting or to fill up space. Don’t quote to “tell the story” or otherwise convey basic information about the text most of the time within this genre you can assume your reader knows the text. Quoting for any other purpose is counterproductive. This involves selecting, presenting, and discussing material from the text in order to “prove” your point-to make your case-in much the same way a lawyer brings evidence before a jury. Within a literary analysis, your purpose is to develop an argument about what the author of the text is doing-how the text “works.” You use quotations to support this argument. Additionally, our Short Guide to Close Reading for Literary Analysis offers wonderful insight into how you can read a piece of literature in order to analyze it. We provide general guidelines and specific suggestions about blending your prose and quoted material as well as information about formatting logistics and various rules for handling outside text.Īlthough this material is focused on integrating your ideas with quotations from novels, poems, and plays into literary analysis papers, in some genres this advice is equally applicable to incorporating quotations from scholarly essays, reports, or even original research into your work.įor further information, check out our Quoting and Paraphrasing resource, or you may wish to see when the Writing Center is offering its next introductory workshop about the genre of literary analysis. On this page we clarify the purpose of using literary quotations in literary analysis papers by exploring why quotations are important to use in your writing and then explaining how to do this. But how do you do this well? What kind of quotations do you use? How do you seamlessly weave together your ideas with someone else’s words? When you’re asked to write a paper analyzing a work of literature, your instructor probably expects you to incorporate quotations from that literary text into your analysis. Use the guidelines below to learn how to use literary quotations.