Writer’s Corner

Writing Academically: Integrated Quotations

The following two sections offer a guide to two important aspects of writing as an academic: integrated quotations and sentence control. Both are skills that any writer can continue to develop over the course of their life as soon as they have a good understanding of how to do them effectively. The first, “integrated quotations”, is a useful piece of terminology for something that on the surface seems quite simple and we do naturally in speech all the time: reporting someone else’s words.

Integrated Quotations

Being able to add quotations into your own sentences is a key part of almost all academic writing. Being able to do it not just accurately but also smoothly is the sign of a capable writer and when a writer struggles with it, it can really disrupt the flow of their writing.

In fiction, non-fiction, newspapers, and magazines, quotations are often allowed to stand alone. They don’t need to be “integrated”. But in more formal writing, like the kinds of academic writing this book is designed to train you for, quotations almost always need to be integrated.

An “integrated” quotation is one where the quote sits as part of a frame sentence in a grammatically correct way. There are two ways to integrate: a “colon quotation” and a full “integrated quotation”.

Colon quotations look like this:

The nature of colon quotations is that, unsurprisingly, they rely on a colon: “The quotation has been given an introductory sentence and a colon to tell us the quotation is connected to that sentence”.

Integrated quotations look like this:

The trick of an integrated quotation is to join the frame sentence and the quotation in a way that makes “a single, grammatically accurate sentence, that probably wouldn’t make sense if you removed the two parts from each other”.

So one way of thinking about the difference between the two is that one relies on two separate whole sentences and the other relies on one single whole sentence. That means you can’t have:

The nature of colon quotations is that, unsurprisingly: “been given an introductory sentence and a colon to tell us the quotation is connected to that sentence”.

Or

The trick of an integrated quotation is to join the frame sentence and the quotation in a way “if you don’t have a single, grammatically accurate sentence, that probably wouldn’t make sense if you removed them from each other”.

You probably have a degree of practice with both of these types of quotation integration already, especially if you’ve done lots of close analysis of individual quotations in a book in English class. But being able to name them should give you greater control over which you choose to use, and being good at using them will make your writing seem smooth and professional.

Side note: Quotation is the noun, quote is the verb. That means we quote another writer in our essay and we insert a quotation. However, in normal speech, it’s typical to call something “a quote” as a shortened version of quotation. It’s only important to observe the rule in writing.