This usually requires four steps: 1) Introducing the Source, 2) Providing and Citing the Evidence, 3) Clarifying Your Intent, 4) Connecting to Your Argument.
Note: Not all genres and contexts call for a fully integrated citation. Background information in history papers and information in lit reviews or lab reports is sometimes summarized in the main voice sentence and then cited at the end of the sentence, without a signal phrase or significant expansion. Integrated quotes are used primarily in argumentative papers and other contexts where you intend to convince or persuade an audience of a specific claim or claims.
Introducing the Source
To be an effective part of your argument, a source must be effectively contextualized. This does not always mean credible — even incorrect information and uninformed but widespread beliefs can be useful evidence in some arguments — but your audience needs to know that. Introducing the source using a signal phrase properly lets your readers know what to expect. For example:
New York Times critic and reporter Jane Doe writes “Thousands of people attended the event.”
Facebook user FakeFakeman says “I was abducted by aliens and held on their mothership for 48 hours.”
As the examples above demonstrate, this step is typically not a full sentence, just the start of a sentence that will then go on to include a quote. You don’t need their entire life story; just include whatever you know about the author that made you decide to include their ideas as evidence.
This is also where you establish your relationship with the idea you’re citing. Check out these starting points for incorporating sources in relation to your argument, supporting evidence, and opposing evidence.
Providing and Citing Evidence
There are several ways to effectively use sources:
Quotations integrate a source’s exact words into your own writing. A quotation is often a short segment of a source’s text and must use quotation marks. We choose to quote when a passage or phrase is so effective—so vivid, clear, unique, authoritative—that it works best in its original form. It may also be that the passage is from a famous source, or the original phrasing is essential to your own analysis or argument.
Paraphrases restate a passage into your own words. A paraphrase is usually similar in length to the original but must be sufficiently different to be your version of the source’s idea(s). The purpose is to think critically about what you have read and present it to your audience in a way that is easy to understand within the context of your own text.
Summaries significantly condense information to present a source’s key ideas, particularly those that are relevant to your argument. You summarize when your readers need a broad overview of a source’s ideas or evidence but do not need to know the in-depth specifics of any single point or example. You may also be demonstrating that you have read and thought critically about how the source influences or contextualizes your own work.
Don’t forget: You’ll include a citation in any instance you’re drawing on sources in your writing, whether through quotation, paraphrase, or summary. The signal phrase is the start of the citation, but information like the date and page number that are required by many citation formats still goes at the end. Find more information about citing sources here.
Clarifying Your Intent
After providing the evidence from your source, you need to explain how you understand that information and place it into the language of your paper, drawing connections to other ideas, especially if some of the vocabulary doesn’t line up exactly between your essay and the quote you’ve chosen. What does this information mean to you? This can seem obvious, but your reader may not have the same background as you and might not make the connection the same way that you did.
This is also where you can call attention to specific word choices, inclusions, or omissions that drew you to this detail or that are necessary clarifications of the detail. You might mention that a statistic is merely an estimate.
Connecting to Your Argument
Now that the audience understands the piece of evidence you’ve incorporated, explicitly connect the evidence to the topic of the paragraph and the main argument of your paper. Why does it matter to your argument? How does it prove your point? Again, this can seem obvious but without communicating that relationship to the reader, they may not understand or may even misinterpret your intentions. Academic text is hard enough to get through.
This can be part of the same sentence as Clarifying Your Intent or can be a separate sentence. Depending on the length of the quote and surrounding information, you can sometimes get two quotes that support a similar argument into a single paragraph, but sometimes a single quote requires enough expansion and clarification that it should stand alone.
Full Example
Topic Sentence: The spread of popular children’s media is creating new issues for parents to consider.
Signal Phrase: Professor David Buckingham states,
Evidence: “The media are seen to have disrupted the process of socialization, upsetting the smooth transmission of values from one generation to the next” (2007, p. 45).
Intent: This indicates that parents are less able to pass on the traditions of their home culture due to media influence,
Connection: which in turn is leading to the homogenization of cultures at a large scale.
Conclusion
This structure for integrating quotes is a useful template, but there are many ways to adapt and expand these sections, and there are also exceptions and variations. For example, an author you’ve cited earlier in the text (or even the same paragraph) doesn’t need as complex an introduction, but still needs a signal phrase to indicate the transition between your words and theirs. Always recognize the specific needs of your situation–your goals as a writer, the discipline and genre you’re writing within–and adjust accordingly.