I'm a young Fagrity and this week I have a quick and dirty tip about how to use quotations

and a meaty middle about why you might want to not call yourself a grammar Nazi.

The quick and dirty tip was written by Edwin Bada Stella so when I say I, it means him.

I have a confession to make.

I often skip the long blocks of quotes when I'm reading academic articles in books.

And I suspect I'm not the only one who does this.

I don't skip the quotes because I'm lazy.

I skip them because they often pull me away from a writer's ideas rather than further

into them.

The writer has put a voice and an idea in my ear only to seed the floor to another voice

that of some quoted authority.

A long quote or worse a series of them can leave me asking yes but what was your point

again?

How does all this overquoting arise?

Well in school teachers require beginning writers to cite sources in their summaries,

paraphrases and direct quotations.

But some students confuse research with mere quotation and the weakest of them write

research papers consisting of a series of whole paragraphs quoted from different sources.

As writers get more sophisticated they learn to find primary sources, to identify a source

authority and stands into discuss the relevance of the quote to their own points.

But many writers still quote too much and for the wrong reasons.

Overquoting can become a life long bad habit.

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