Handling In-text Quotations:

Summaries, Paraphrases, and Direct Quotes

Summaries: When you write about a text, you often need to build a context for your paper by summarizing one or more key sources. When you write a summary, you need to condense the primary text to one main idea, usually conveyed in one sentence. If the primary text you are referring to is particularly long, complex, or central to your analysis, you might end up writing two or more sentences to summarize it.

For example, if you were writing a research paper on Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, you could summarize this novel in one sentence.

In Fitzgerald’s tale of class conflict, Nick Carraway narrates the tragic fate

of rags-to-riches Jay Gatsby, who ultimately fails to win the heart of a

poor little rich girl, Daisy Buchanan, because her blue blood husband

Tom is a man intent on keeping what’s his—by any means.

If you summarize an entire text, make sure it appears in your works cited page, but don’t cite it in your paper. If you are summarizing a key passage, you need to include a page number after your summary.

For example, if you summarize one of the scenes in Fitzgerald’s novel, include an in-text citation:

After Nick has lunch with Jay and Meyer Wolfsheim, he has a new perspective on

Gatsby (Fitzgerald 23-28).

Paraphrases: When you are analyzing specific details of a primary text, you may be tempted to quote a lot. However, you should place some of these details in paraphrases. Because these details are taken from another person’s work, you need to provide a page number, even if it’s a paraphrase, meaning rewording of similar length.

For example, if you were to paraphrase Nick’s thoughts about Jordan Baker, using your own words, you would still need to cite a page number:

Fitzgerald furthers his use of cars as a symbol for people in the scene where Nick tells Jordan that she was a careless person because of the way she drove (78).

Direct Quotes. When you quote a key passage, even just a key phrase or a unique word, you must place this quote in quotation marks and provide a page number. In addition to providing accurate quotations with page numbers, you must set up each quote with an explanation and then comment on each quote with a point of analysis. Without these comments and analysis, your quotes appear wedged into your paper at random, and your reader will be unsure of the significance. Here are a few quotes that take a key word, a phrase, a sentence, or block of text from a novel. Note how the writer sets up each quote and analyzes each one as well.

Quoting a Key Word:

Because Nick describes Daisy as a “grail” in Gatsby’s eyes, we can better understand his zeal and obsession because his desire is cast in terms of a holy errand (149).

Quoting a Key Phrase:

Fitzgerald establishes Gatsby’s deep connection with Daisy by explaining that Gatsby “felt married to her” after their youthful nights of passion (149). Because of this bond, Gatsby feels as though he is entitled to her companionship even more than her legal husband is.

Quoting a Sentence:

When Daisy was a debutante back in Kentucky, she and Gatsby had a romantic affair. It was during their evenings out that they formed an emotional and physical intimacy, one based on Gatsby’s desire to gain a prize from a higher social standing than his: “He took what he could get, ravenously and unscrupulously—eventually he took Daisy one still October night, took her because he had no real right to touch her hand” (149). Here, Fitzgerald makes it clear that Gatsby’s desire stems from class envy, evident in “no real right,” more than any sincere love for Daisy as a person.

Using Block Quotes: You need to put quotations in a block format if you quote more than three lines (either a really long sentence or more than one sentence). However, you need to be sure that all that quoting is warranted. You must set up the block quote and analyze it extensively. Otherwise, you look as though you are “padding” your paper or that you don’t have a good reason for a big chunk of quoted text.

In case the reader becomes consumed with the particulars of these two love triangles and forgets that this novel is an allegory equating Daisy with the American Dream, Fitzgerald closes his novel by using images from American history, specifically comparing the land with a woman:

I became aware of the old island her that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes—a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made a way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity to wonder. (182)

If Daisy symbolizes the land, then Jay surely symbolizes these yearning explorers.