Stop Quoting! (You Can Quote Me On That)

The Problem

Many of my students seem to have learned along the way that quoting articles is a good idea.  I'm not sure exactly where this comes from, although three possibilities occur to me.

Quoting To Avoid Plagiarism

Maybe a student picked up the quoting habit in this way.  First, the student turns in a paper in which, through inexperience, he or she plagiarizes some published writing.  The helpful teacher informs the student "If you are going to use someone else's words, you must put those words in quotation marks and cite the source."  From then on, the student now has a license to use other people's words without being accused of plagiarism!  The teacher, grateful that the student has learned the importance of quotation marks and citations, declines to ruin this success by pointing out that, while the quotation and citation has been done correctly, the result is a lousily written paper.

Quoting Out Of Inferiority Complex

When a student is asked to summarize some published piece of writing, it is a rather daunting task.  How can I, a college undergraduate, be expected to write something more clearly and thoroughly than the published author of the target article, when that person has a PhD, 20 years of writing experience, and knows the material ten times better than I do?  Faced with that realization, the student decides he or she can't win.  But if you can't do better than the author, you can at least do as well as the author - by saying exactly what the author said.  The student paper then becomes summary by collage - summary by cut and paste.  Unfortunately, this isn't a summary at all.

Failure To Discriminate Two Types Of Quotes

On the other hand, it may be that the student got good advice from a teacher along the way, perhaps in an English class, that quoting provides a useful starting point to analysis.  That's correct.  The truth is: there are times when quotations are a great idea.  But just because quotations are a great idea sometimes doesn't alter the fact that quotations are a terrible idea at other times.

A quote is a good idea if you want to comment on something the author said - often to critique it.  A quote is a bad idea if you are quoting the author to replace some of your own words.  To put this another way, if you quote the author and then continue on from the quote without any further comment, you've quoted inappropriately.

This point is subtle enough that I will have to make up an example.  Here's a case where a quote is appropriate:

In their article, the authors defined aversion as "a decrease in the amount of the stimulus consumed" (Authorson et al., p. 7).  However, many authors reserve the term aversion for a negative hedonic evaluation, and use the term avoidance to indicate a reduction in intake.

In the example above, the student is commenting on the author's choice of words, and so it is necessary to first document the author's word choice with a quote.  The quote is necessary here, otherwise the student's comment makes no sense.  However, if the student wasn't going to comment on the word choice, and just wanted to report the dependent variable, the quote would be inappropriate.

The Tip:  Don't Have The Source Material Sitting Next To You When You Write

So how do you avoid filling your paper with quotes?  My advice is to avoid the temptation completely by writing your paper without having the work you are summarizing sitting next to you.  This might sound scary, and that's right.  It is fear that makes you quote in the first place - feeling like you don't know the article well enough, feeling like you can't phrase things as well as the authors, feeling like you need to borrow some of the article's "sparkle" for your own paper.  If you have the source sitting next to you, you will give into that fear and your paper will turn out lousy as a result.

So read your target article carefully, take notes, highlight it, whatever you normally do.  Maybe even make an outline of what you want to write.  Then, bury everything.  The article.  Your notes.  Your outline.  Go and write your summary without consulting anything but your own brain.  If you can't do this, you aren't ready to write the paper anyway because you don't know the material as well as you think you do.

Once you've written that draft, of course go back to your notes, your outline, and the source material.  You probably did forget something, you probably didn't say everything perfectly, and who knows, you might even need to get some numbers or even words out of that source material.  But with a draft in hand all written in your own words, it is much easier to resist the temptation of over-quotation.  An added bonus is that if you ever have to recall the information later (like on a closed-notes exam) you will have learned it much better than if you cut and pasted.