I gave a lesson on integrating and formatting quotations on Tuesday, and – serendipity! – Carol Saller at the Chronicle of Higher Ed published about correct use of quotations the next day, right AFTER it would have been of some use to me. It doesn’t really matter; I’m unlikely to pass on any advice containing the words “no one will accuse you of plagiarism if you…” to my students. Nevertheless, her article tidies up some things I’ve never been sure about, like whether it’s necessary to put ellipses at the beginning/end of a sentence fragment (although she doesn’t address quotations like the one I use above, in which the ellipsis implies info that the reader must supply imaginatively.) Apparently there will be a Part 2 and Part 3, so by next semester, my quotation-formatting nit-picking will be at a whole other level!
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Classroom as Microcosm 
I haven’t had a look at that cronicle. I will later when I’m back from class.
This is the kind of stuff I need to improve my English. Thank you very much!
I love your blog!
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Merry: thank you! I hope you find it useful.
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You should be at our university. A college student in the English department wrote an article for the school newspaper about how citations were hindering writing and professors shouldn’t worry about them. Um…………..Good luck when you have a job and get in a crap ton of trouble because you stole information from someone else. Have fun with that. (Where do they get these ideas?!)
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NTW: Believe me, impressing the importance of quoting properly upon our students is an enormous, time-consuming, irritating part of our job…
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Thanks for your article and the link. If I were still in the classroom, this would become part of my arsenal to use in class. Teaching the art of effective quoting as well as the more general art of effective summarization is not an easy task. Students (others?) tend to see only the surface mechanics of getting the details right when–in reality–effective summary and quoting demonstrate careful critical thnking. Now, mastering critical thinking is a real challenge!
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Patti:
I have spent the last couple of weeks once again confronting the reality that “effective summary and quoting demonstrate careful critical thnking” – and that these are faculties that many students need to work hard to develop, because they’re not there yet…
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