Incorporating quotations into your sentences

It is important that quotations are appropriately embedded and integrated into a sentence; in other words they cannot stand on their own as individual sentences. The standard means of integration involves presenting the quotation as the content of a clause introduced by that:

Note that this formal means for introducing an integrated quotation is different in Dutch and English. In Dutch it is standard practice to use a colon, whereas a colon in English is much less frequent in English for integrated quotations. We therefore advise against the following:

Another common means of integrating a quotation in English is to use a subordinate clause with as, with the quotation itself constituting the main clause.

How to adjust a quotation

There are a number of situations in which you may feel it necessary to adjust the quotation in some way. This is permissible, but only if the adjustment is innocuous; and you must make it clear to the reader what you have done. Sometimes you may wish to reduce a quotation by leaving out parts which you consider are less relevant. To do this, replace the section you wish to leave out by three dots, optionally between brackets. You may also wish to make alterations or additions to allow the sentence you are writing to read as a grammatical sentence or to clarify the quotation. In this case you should use square brackets around the material which you have inserted yourself. The sentence below contains an example of reduction and one of alteration:

If you want to alter a quotation by adding italics to a word or phrase then you should include the phrase my italics, followed by a comma and your initials without full stops in between square brackets. Finally, if there is a mistake in the quotation (of grammar, for example) then stick to the original and add the italicized word sic between square brackets. Consider this example: