When handing your essay or research paper, you will face the number of occasions with the necessity of using quotes from reliable sources. Quotation is effective, because it greatly strengthens our writing, thus providing too many quotes can leave very little room for sharing your ideas and providing personal arguments. In order to use quotes properly for making your piece of writing persuasive and accurate, we need to keep up to some rules.

We should always remember that the quality of quotes is more important that the quantity of quotes. Extensive quoting may indicate that the student is devoid of his personal point of view. In case quotes are placed one after another, the general audience will fail to notice the link between arguments and comprehend the pivotal ideas. Furthermore, we always need to use quotation as the support for our argument, but not vice versa. When writing your academic essay, it is also essential to provide short quotes, because readers are primarily looking for concise information. This will also secure the writer from extensive use of quotes, which may decrease the significance of his or her argument.

One more challenge that is frequently faced by student is how to introduce a quote within a piece of writing. The use of reporting verbs is the best solution in such cases. To the most common reporting verbs we can refer “note”, “claim”, “believe”, “argue”, “insist”, “regard”, “write”, “observe”, “reveal” and others. If you have already used several reporting verbs with quotes in your papers, you may also use the construction ‘according to …’, which is also very effective. After you provided a quote in your essay, do not forget to cite it properly. Get to know more about the most common formats like APA, MLA, Turabian or Oxford.

When studying at university, you have to significantly care about the use of quotes in your essays. There were thousands of cases when the professors penalized students for the extensive use of ‘block quotes’, which are at least four lines in length. If you are given the assignment to analyze the quote, then ‘block quotes’ are permissible. For example, if you argue the author’s position and experience, and then explain it in your own words, then you do a great job. But, for instance, when handling book reports or movie reviews, the students may use the ‘block quote’, but only once. Such quotes may help the general audience better understand the writer’s or director’s purpose.