WRITING AND CHOOSING EVIDENCE
How to embed quotations into context-setting sentences
This the second guide on how to write the evidence part of a PEA paragraph. It will explain some different ways to embed quotations into sentences that provide context for the quotation.
This is part of the Writing and choosing evidence series:
How to embed quotations into a context-setting sentence
Contents of this guide
Previously on how to write your evidence…
In the previous part of this guide we established the following things:
That the evidence part of a paragraph is made up of a quotation plus the context of that quotations.
That you need to put your quotations into context in order to ensure you don’t misinterpret them, and to make your argument more convincing.
That the context for a quotation will explain what is going on in the text at that point, which will include at least the sentence from which the quotation comes, if not more information.
Now we need to look at choosing what quotations to include and how to actually go about embedding them into the context-setting sentence.
How to embed your quotations
Once you’ve decided the context for your quotation, you need to figure out how to combine it with the quotation itself. This is where the embedding comes in. Your goal (most of the time) is to write a single grammatically correct sentence which includes both the context for your quotations and the quotations themselves. Exactly how you do this will depend slightly on what you are quoting.
Embedding quotations from regular prose (fiction or non-fiction) and poetry
This method will work for most of the texts that you have to write about. Your context will generally come first, with the quotation at the end. For example:
When Peter sees the haunted house from the end of the driveway, he “starts with fear.”
If you want to include multiple short quotations from the same part of a text in the same piece of evidence that is fine. It’s good practice, in fact. This will mean your evidence becomes a mixture of context and quotation across a longer sentence. For example:
When Peter sees the haunted house from the end of the driveway, he “starts with fear” before “steeling himself” and walking through the gate.
In this example, there are two quotations (one showing Peter’s fear and one showing his subsequent bravery), both of which would be discussed in the analysis (see below for more information on this).
As these examples show, ‘when’ is a very useful way to begin the context for your quotations. You’ll need to be careful, though. There must be actual context after the when, and not just a quotation. Here’s an example which starts with ‘when’ but doesn’t actually provide any context:
When Peter “starts with fear” he “steel[s] himself” and walks through the gate.
Where is Peter? What’s going on? What’s the cause of his fear? There’s no context to provide answers to these questions. Just putting ‘when’ at the start of your evidence doesn’t guarantee that you’ve got context.
Finally, using ‘when’ is far from the only way you can phrase your context. You don’t want your analytical writing to become formulaic. Here is another way of phrasing the earlier example about Peter and the haunted house:
Although Peter is initially scared as he approaches the haunted house, “starting with fear” at the sight of it, he “steel[s] himself” before walking through the gate.
Having some variety in the way you contextualise your evidence will help make your analytical writing more sophisticated.
Embedding quotations from direct speech or from play scripts
For this you’ve got two options for embedding the words a character says. The first is to turn the direct speech into indirect speech and embed the quotation that way, similar to the method above:
When Peter collects his GCSE results, he tells his mother that he has “never been so happy” and that “something must have gone wrong at the exam board.”
Here, the quotations are both from Peter’s direct speech, but they’ve been turned into indirect speech and just embedded into a sentence.
The second approach for this kind of evidence is to embed direct speech quotations using the direct speech conventions from narrative writing. For example:
“I’ve never been so happy in my life,” Peter tells his mother when he collects his GCSE results. “Something must have gone wrong at the exam board.”
Here, we’ve got essentially the same quotations and context as in the first example, but it is presented as direct speech rather than indirect speech. Admittedly, it’s two sentences rather than one, but that’s fine if you’re using this method for embedding.
Embedding character description
Another potentially tricky type of quotation to embed is descriptive words or phrases, without actions or words to go with them. Consider this description of Scrooge from the very start of A Christmas Carol:
Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster…
How would you embed and contextualise a quotation from this? We don’t really need to worry about what’s going on at this point in the story (nothing is going on, plot-wise), so instead you can just use a phrase like “is described as” to introduce your quotations. This is fine. You should also say where in the text the description occurs to help give it more context.
At the start of the novel, Scrooge is described as “a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone” who is as “hard and sharp as flint.”
Seamlessly embedding quotations
To really master this skill, you need to be able to embed your quotations seamlessly. To help you understand what this means, let’s look at an example of a quotation and some context that are not seamlessly embedded:
When Peter first arrives at the football game, it says “I smiled from ear to ear and hugged my mum.”
This is not really embedded evidence: there is context, and there is a quotation, but they are very separate. If someone were to read this out loud, you would know exactly which part was in quotation marks, without having to see it written down. This is what you want to avoid. There are 3 separate problems here:
‘It says’ – you need to avoid this phrase at all costs in your analytical writing
The quotation is in the 1st person (I/my) but the context is in the 3rd person (Peter)
The quotation is in the past tense (smiled/hugged) but the context is in the present tense (arrives), as it should be.
The first problem is easy to fix: we can use the regular quotations method outlined above, giving us this:
When Peter first arrives at the football game, “I smiled from ear to ear and hugged my mum”
That gets rid of it says, but it’s not much better. In fact, it’s probably worse as it makes even less grammatical sense now. We need to deal with the person and the tense. The way to do this is to use square brackets. This is how you signal that you’ve changed something inside a quotation. Using square brackets, we can change the pronoun, determiners (e.g. my) and the verb tense so the overall sentence is grammatically correct:
When Peter first arrives at the football game, “[he] smile[s] from ear to ear and hug[s] [his] mum.”
Now we have a perfectly grammatical sentence. If this were read aloud, there is no way you could tell which part was in quotation marks and which part was not. However, it’s still not quite perfect as a piece of evidence. We don’t really need that “[he]” at the start of the quotation - it’s a bit clunky. There’s no need to put the first word of any quotation in square brackets – we can just take it out of the quotation marks instead. Giving us this seamlessly embedded quotation.
When Peter first arrives at the football game, he “smile[s] from ear to ear and hug[s] [his] mum.”
That’s better!
What quotations you should embed
The final part of this process, which we’ve not covered in much detail so far, is deciding which bits of a text to actually quote in your evidence. Which parts of a text do you quote and which parts do you include in the context?
The short answer is that you should quote the parts you want to analyse and include everything else as part of the context-setting sentence. Let’s look at a quick example to make this clearer. Imagine you wanted to analyse this bit of a text, focussing on the way the setting is presented.
There was a drab corridor facing her, with a porter's office on the right, where an old man sat in front of a fire reading a Penny Dreadful.
You wouldn’t want to quote all of those words in your essay - there are too many. So you’d just choose the ones you wanted to analyse and quote those, putting them into context using the other words in this sentence, and the relevant bits from elsewhere in the text.
So you’d look at the sentence and ask yourself, which words or phrases are most relevant and meaningful? In other words, which words would I want to really focus on discussing in my analysis?
For this example, you might well choose “drab corridor” and “old man reading a Penny Dreadful” as they’re both quite interesting and meaningful. So, including the relevant context from elsewhere in the text (e.g. who the ‘her’ refers to, and where the corridor is), you would end up with an evidence sentence like this.
When Ruby first arrives at the offices of Lockhart and Selby, she finds herself in a “drab corridor” with an “old man reading a Penny Dreadful.”
You would then need to go on to analyse “drab corridor” (perhaps especially the adjective ‘drab’) plus the image of an old man reading a magazine of scary stories (a Penny Dreadful).
The key principle here is that you should analyse everything you quote. Do not quote anything that you don’t plan to analyse in the remainder of the paragraph, either for its implied meaning or for any methods or big ideas it contains. Quote the sections you want to analyse and leave the rest unquoted but summarised in your context setting sentence.
Summing up - key things to remember when writing your evidence
Evidence = context + quotation
Context = what’s going on in the text at the time the quotation occurs
Context is necessary because it avoids misinterpretation and makes your argument more convincing
Your evidence should be a single, grammatically correct sentence
Context should go before the quotation - ‘when’ is a very useful word for beginning the context part of an evidence sentence
There are special ways that you can contextualise direct speech and description
If you embed your evidence seamlessly, it will be hard/impossible for somebody to tell, when hearing the sentence read out loud, which parts are quotations and which parts are context
You can use square brackets to change parts of your quotation to embed it seamlessly
You should only quote the parts of the text that you plan to analyse - leave everything else summarised in the context-setting sentence. Everything you quote must be discussed in your analysis.