Using Borrowed Material

Here are a few guidelines to help you integrate borrowed material – paraphrases, summaries, and quotations – into your theme. Examples are included.

1.  Always “lead into” any borrowed material; introduce it so that your reader knows the author or source. The first time that you refer to another’s work, identify the author if possible; later, use only the author’s last name.

Erich Fromm, a noted psychologist, believes that most people are more concerned about receiving love than giving it (22).

According to Daniel Boorstin, Harvard professor, television "has democratized experience” (55).

2.  If you do not mention the author’s name in the lead-in, put it in parentheses along the with the page number.

            The Big Bang Theory can be defended (Tracy 302).

3.  If the lead-in to a quotation is a sentence itself, put a colon after the lead-in. If it ends in words like said or wrote, use a comma. If it ends in that or it runs smoothly into the borrowed material, use no punctuation after it.

Writing in College English, Jean Muellen notes a surprising fact: “In 112 freshman English texts, 92.4% of the writers were men” (273).

Jeanes Westin, in her article “Planned Pethood,” states, “Maybe man won’t overrun this planet, but his furry pet poodles and Siamese cats might” (37).

She adds that “[t]here are at least 50 million homeless cats and dogs in this country” (38).

4.  Periods and commas are placed inside quotation marks, but colons and semicolons go outside.

James Thurber uses slang such as “a nervous wreck,” “ran him through,” and “the hell with it”; these phrases help to create his style in “Courtship Through the Ages.”

5.  If you omit words from the middle of a quotation, insert three periods with a space before and after each one (an ellipsis). If the omission is at the end of a quotation and followed by a parenthetical citation, use a regular ellipsis and place the period after the citation.

The 1935-36 edition of the St. John’s University Catalog has this to say about the formation of its students’ character: “If college youths of today are to be the leaders of tomorrow . . . they must above all be men of character and vision” (49).

In the good opinion of Norman Cousins, a modern editor, “Man is a creature of dualism. He is both good and evil . . .” (29).

6.  If you add something to or alter a quotation, enclose the alteration in square brackets.

Hollis Alpert, a movie reviewer for Saturday Review, is concerned about the American image: he says, “The city [New York] never seemed more violent and corrupt than in The French Connection” (358).

7.  In a borrowed quotation, put single quotation marks within your double quotation marks wherever the author used double quotation marks. (See also item 8.)

            Alpert explains that with Easy Rider, “A new genre was born, one that film historians labeled ‘the road picture’” (32).

8.  If you use an extended quotation that exceeds four full typed lines, do five things: (1) precede the material with a colon; (2) indent ten spaces from the left-hand margin; (3) omit quotation marks unless they were in the original author’s work; (4) double space the indented material (if your paper is double spaced); and (5) place the parenthetical citation two spaces after the period.

DuPlessis-Mornay, like Calvin before him, would not tolerate private individuals instigating rebellion for the sake of religious reform:

The obligation to serve God depends upon the position to which one has been called. Private individuals, however, have no power, perform no magistracy, have no dominion and no power of punishment. God did not give the sword to private persons and therefore does not require them to use it.  (113)