1. Don’t Float Your Quotes
Don’t Float Your Quotes! How to use blended quotations effectively in your writing

2. Effectively incorporating quotations into writing can be tough!
Sometimes writers leave quotations “floating” or unattached to a sentence which causes confusion and usually results in a loss of meaning or focus.

3. One way to support a key idea
in your analysis is to include words and phrases from a piece of literature.
These words and phrases (or quotations) do NOT have to be dialogue from a character.
An effective way to use quotations is to blend them into your sentences…

4. …in the middle
Gomez realizes that her grandmother taught her not only how to swim but that she should be “proud of [her] large body” and “African hair,” and this lesson has allowed her to gain “control over [her] own life” as a strong independent woman.

5. When you blend a quotation into a sentence, be sure that the quoted material fits grammatically into the sentence.
For example, be sure that what you end up with is a complete sentence and not a sentence fragment.

6. What’s wrong with this sentence?
“The sea,” she learned, “a fearful place” for her African ancestors.
What’s wrong with this sentence?
It’s missing a VERB!
The sentence should be written as…
“The sea,” she learned, was “a fearful place” for her African ancestors.

7. Blended Quotation Practice
For each sentence below, blend the quotation and the sentence on your own paper. You do not have to use all the words in a quotation, but you should pick out the KEY words and phrases that emphasize the point you are trying to make.
MAKE SURE YOUR SENTENCE IS A COMPLETE SENTENCE!
Sentence Poe uses sensory details to create a feeling of terror.
Quotation “His room was as black as pitch with the thick darkness….”

8. Sentence Edgar Allan Poe uses comparisons for description.
Quotation “old man’s heart” and “sound, such as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton.”
Sentence In “The Tell-Tale Heart,” Poe immediately establishes the narrator as troubled.
Quotation “nervous—very, very dreadfully nervous”