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Dropped Quotes Must Die!

Dr. Loewe | ENGW | St. Edward's University

The Bad News...

I am a total stickler about what we writing teachers call dropped quotes. A dropped quote feels jarring
to readers and harms the writer’s ethos. I hate them and I penalize them.

The Good News...

Dropped quotes are easy to spot and to fix.

What Does a Dropped Quote Look Like?

Harvard writing teacher Nancy Sommers argues that teachers should work on giving students
feedback that motivates revision. “The challenge we face as teachers is to develop comments which
will provide an inherent reason for students to revise; it is a sense of revision as discovery, as a
repeated process of beginning again, as starting out new, that our students have not learned” (156).

Why was that a Dropped Quote?

It’s a dropped quote because the highlighted quote is simply “dropped into” the writer’s paper without
being integrated into a sentence of the student’s own words. Notice how the highlighted sentence
begins and ends with a quotation mark and how the student is totally absent from that sentence.

So What’s the Big Deal?

In a dropped quote, you simply disappear from your own writing, at least for that sentence. It feels as
if you just “hand the microphone” over to someone else and say:

I’m outta here. I may be back later, but for now I’m gonna take a break. By the way, I’m also
gonna serve up a big, unedited chunk of other people’s words for you to slog through because
I don’t feel like selecting and packaging source evidence right now. See ya.

It gets even worse if you “weave a quote quilt,” simply stringing together dropped quote after dropped
quote. Quote quilts make you seem as if you would prefer to simply outsource the paper's voice to
others.

How do I Fix a Dropped Quote?

It's easy. Just make sure that the quoted material is integrated into a sentence of your own. See this revision of
the previous example:

Harvard writing teacher Nancy Sommers argues that teachers should work on giving students
feedback that motivates revision. She calls on teachers to “develop comments which will provide an
inherent reason for students to revise” because students have not been taught “a sense of revision as
discovery, as a repeated process of beginning again, as starting out new” (156).