so you have an essay deal on a story player article that you've read and after reviewing text a few times you finally found a quote that you want to use in your essay to support your argument that's a great start but how exactly do you get that quote into your essay including well chosen quotations in your writing adds strengths to your argument but you want to avoid drop-in quotations into your essay like this give your reader a heads up that valuable citation is coming in order to make your quotes or textual evidence that fluidly into your own writing rather than randomly dropped or forcing consider using the three following techniques for smooth and accurate integration of quotes the first method is using a common different quotes from other sources into your essay this technique is similar to writing a piece of dialogue in a story to see if this method works in your essay ask yourself these questions can the phrase you've written before the boat stand on its own of the sentence if the answer is no you should use a comma after your introductory phrase and before the quote to connect these pieces of information for example set up your quote the same way you'd write dialogue in an error here your introductory or your signal phrase identifies the speaker and a bit of context before including the quote itself in quotation marks as a writer you can choose whether you want to provide context for your quotes before or after the quote itself depending on what you'd like to excise and how you'd like the sentence to flow in your paragraph notice that these highlighted phrases or fragments cannot work as sentences themselves therefore you would use a comma to attach your signal phrase to the quote the second method for integrating a quote from another source into your essay involves using a colon this method is similar to what a lawyer might do in a courtroom the lawyer makes a claim and then to support it he points to a piece of evidence exhibit a to proof the statement that he just made to see if this method works in your essay ask yourself this key question can the phrase you've written before the quote stands on its own as a sentence if the answer is yes you can put a colon up to your phrase before the quote or a minute let's say you just written the following claim since this setup phrase can stand on its own as a sentence you can put a cone after the phrase and before your quote that proves your claim like this it's helpful to think of the colon is a punctuation mark that acts more like an equal sign the phrases on both sides of the colon work together to make the same point a third method for embedding recoiling to your writing is to make it authors where it's part of your own sentence or idea without using a comma or a colon to mark a concrete distinction to see if this method works for your essay ask yourself this if you took away the quotation marks around the author's language would you need to put any punctuation in those spots to make it work here's an example of what I'm talking about to support a claim about the types of clothing worn by the characters in the story this student uses the author's freezing in her sentence to make her claim more concrete look what happens if we take away the quotation marks since the statement still makes sense when the quotation marks are removed and it isn't necessary to add any other punctuation where they were you can go ahead and put the quotation marks back where they were and just let them sit there to mark which words are yours and which are not in your argumentative statement perhaps this seems like too much effort after all it'd be easier to just drag and drop boats into your essay wherever you like but what happens if you don't use these methods using punctuation when integrating quotes is like following the rules of the road and throwing quotes into your essay without letting your reader know they're coming is like changing lanes without indicating that guy I mean that quote just came out of nowhere additionally not using correct punctuation when you embed quotes into your writing might send the wrong signal either that you don't know the rules or that you do but you just don't care so those are the three methods you can use to integrate sources into your work don't forget after every quote be sure to cite your source with an in-text citation for more help with that click on the link provided in the comments below whether you choose to use a comma a colon or no punctuation when integrating the quote into your sentence it's important to craft your signal phrases carefully and as always be sure to leave time for proofreading thanks for watching you