More on Quotation

Monday's blog on quotation methods might have been a bit misleading. I didn't mean to suggest that all quotes have to be preceded by a colon. Another option is to lead with a comma:

e.g. Elisa wants more out of life, but the tinker tells her, "It's no life for a woman."

That's one way. Another one would be to simply put quotation marks around the exact words without any attribute phrases ("he said" and "She told him," for example). You could just make the quote a natural part of your sentence:

e.g. While Elisa wants more out of her life, the travelling supposedly offers "no life for a woman."

The one thing you shouldn't do is the hanging quote, as I've often talked about. Don't just throw the complete quote, wrapped in quotation marks in the middle of a paragraph, a sentence all by itself. You should always lead in to it.

Hope this clarifies things a bit. Good luck on the essays. I've answered quite a few emails these past few days--although not nearly as many as I'm used to, for which I thank you all. I don't mind emails, but it's nice not to have so many to deal with at once. As of now (8:29 p.m. Tuesday night), I'm officially off duty. It's been a long few days, as I'm sure it has been for most of you, and I'm sure it's not over for many of you yet. Essays are due on Friday.

GC