I once asked my students how many of them had skipped reading the big, chunky quote that appeared on one of the pages of our textbook. Every hand went up, including my own. Over time I’ve trained myself not to read big quotes. You probably have, too. It’s easy to skip over them, because you know that the author is going to summarize the quote in one sentence right after it appears.
So why even write those quotes?
Don’t write them. That’s the secret. Don’t quote anything that you can paraphrase in one sentence.
This insight I credit to my writing partner, Nancy Abelmann, a brilliant and ebullient anthropologist with no patience for big quotes. Nancy and I show each other almost everything we write before we show it to anyone else. As readers, we tell each other what we think. What we really think. To give each other permission to rip a draft to shreds, we write on the top of it: “I have no ego.”
Nancy can praise but she does not coddle. Once when I wrote something spectacularly pedantic but actually meaningless, she said, “I’m a smart person and I don’t understand this so take it out.” Just like that. Several steps ahead of me, she had already figured out that even 100 revisions of the claim I had drafted wouldn’t make it work. Nancy has, of course, read what I’ve written about her here and complained, “I sound so mean.” I disagree. Mean, to me, is letting your friend sound stupid when they think they’re sounding smart. You want your friend to tell you in the fitting room that that dress makes you look fat—you know, before you wear it in public.
What Nancy did for my writing, most of all, was cut the fat. I remember vividly the day Nancy asked, while wading through a particularly gnarly quote I’d slapped in the middle of a page, “Do I really need to read this?”
I eventually reached the stage in working with Nancy where I sat like a waitress taking orders as she went up and down my draft. But I wasn’t there yet. I did my best to justify the quote’s existence. She was unmoved. On her fourth book and third kid, she didn’t want to waste time reading even halfway through the quote she didn’t need to read. Then she told me what her bar was for quoting instead of paraphrasing—something that has been my guide ever since: “If you’re not going to use this quote to make at least two points, just paraphrase it. Use every quote two ways.”
A quote should serve two functions in your paper. Does it support your argument? Great! But that shouldn’t be the only thing it does. It could support a claim that you’re making, at the same time as it opens up a new problem for your paper to work through. Does the quote present a counter-argument to your thesis? Fine! But, again, that shouldn’t be the only thing it does. It could serve as a point of debate, and at the same time identify the audience that your paper addresses, or the limits of your claims, or the scope of the problem you address.
How do you get a quote to do two things? Read it more than once. As you read, challenge yourself to come up with not two, but three, four, or five observations you could make about that quote. Think of that quote as a lemon, and you’re trying to make a pitcher of lemonade. Give it a good twist, then another, then another. You need every drop of juice you can get out of it.
Pay close attention to the language of the quote. Consider every word in it a revealing choice. Is the quote LOL-funny, gasp-in-horror, or achingly poetic? A quote that has entertainment value is an appealing addition to a paper, provided that you can explain why it is entertaining. The quote can’t just be funny in other words. It still has to make at least two points for your paper.
I realize that the undying allure of the big, chunky quote is that it appears to do one thing perfectly: extend the length of your paper without much effort. Running half a page short with only an hour to go until submission time? Why not add a big, chunky quote? After all, there’s no limit on the amount of characters the cut-and-paste function can teleport into your draft.
Sadly, quotes added for the purpose of making a paper seem longer only make a paper seem more pointless. Think of word count in terms of quality, not quantity: words that don’t contribute to your argument don’t count. For a college paper, your challenge is not simply to write the required number of words, but to demonstrate how much you can say about only a few words. How can you do more with less? Mentally put my friend Nancy on your shoulder as you write; when she asks, “Do I really need to read this?” make sure you can answer, “Yes.”
Pingback: Rules Amended | Whizbang