Discovery and Attribution: You Want a Piece of This?

Sweet Dreams

Embedding Evidence, Part 2

A teen boy writing.

Read and follow these tips on using parenthetical citations, referring to this sample sentence:

Child therapist Sarah Michaels considered how children define violence in her study: "Of the 500 children polled, more than one half of the boys played video games they themselves considered violent" (15).

Punctuating PARENTHETICAL CITATION:

  • Page numbers come after the quote, but before the end punctuation.
  • The period always comes after the page number, not before.
  • However, a question mark or exclamation mark still needs to be included within a quote: "Is it really the sun?" (35).
  • There is NO punctuation inside the parenthesis.
  • If the source does not credit an author, use the first piece of information in the Works Cited entry, usually the title
  • Only use the first key word if you are adding the source name to the parenthetical citation. For authors, this is the first author's last name, and for titles when there is no author, this is the first key word of the title.

Adding or changing words to make the quote make sense:

Place changes in brackets.

  • Original quote: "Kind of like he's mad at 'em because he ain't a big guy" (26).
  • Clarified quote: "Kind of like [Curley's] mad at 'em because he ain't a big guy" (26).

Omitting parts of long quotes

Omissions of text within a quote should be marked with ellipses [...].
  • Original quote: "The six victims stood in the rain like exhausted soldiers, waiting to be taken home" (26).
  • Shortened quote: "The six victims stood in the rain…waiting to be taken home" (26).

Note: When the omitted part of the quotation is in the beginning of a sentence, you must use brakets [ ] to change any normally lower case letters into capital letters. Any time you change a quote to fit how you are using it in your essay, you must show how you have changed it, often by putting brackets around the change you have made. See this example:

  • Original quote: "Kind of like he's mad at 'em because he ain't a big guy" (26).
  • Shortened quote: "[H]e's mad…because he ain't a big guy" (26).

A Quotation within a Quotation:

Use single quotation marks to show the quote your source used:

  • The breathless narrator exclaims, "Jack said, 'You're pretty,' and I practically fainted. Then he said, 'I like your shoes'!" (1).

Go to the next page to practice EMBEDDING EVIDENCE.