Introducing Quotations

Do not “DROP” your quotations into your writing. Please introduce them with a signal phrase or integrate them into the structure of your sentences.

Dropped Quotation:

Baca tells us of his birth. “It was a special birth. Since the venom had mixed in my blood, I’d have skills to see in the dark and I’d change many times in life just as the snake sluffs its skin” (108).

Please introduce your same question in different ways.

Basic signal phrase (SPEAKER + VERB):

At the beginning

Baca explains, “It was a special birth. Since the venom had mixed in my blood, I’d have skills to see in the dark and I’d change many times in life just as the snake sluffs its skin” (108).

At the end

“It was a special birth. Since the venom had mixed in my blood, I’d have skills to see in the dark and I’d change many times in life just as the snake sluffs its skin,” explains Baca (108).

In the middle

“It was a special birth,” explains Baca. “Since the venom had mixed in my blood, I’d have skills to see in the dark and I’d change many times in life just as the snake sluffs its skin” (108).

*Using “that” (don’t add a comma)

Baca explains that “[i]t was a special birth. Since the venom had mixed in my blood, I’d have skills to see in the dark and I’d change many times in life just as the snake sluffs its skin” (108).

. (Please avoid “says” with a more interesting verb! Use thesaurus.com)

Full sentence followed by a colon

Despite his challenges, Baca was a fighter early on, and even his birth predicted his own transformation as a person in the future: “It was a special birth. Since the venom had mixed in my blood, I’d have skills to see in the dark and I’d change many times in life just as the snake sluffs its skin” (108).

Integrate the quotation into the structure of your sentence.

Although Baca found himself struggling at the moment with various tragic events, he knew that “[he’d] change many times in life just as the snake sluffs its skin” (108).