The problem of clarity

When you use quotations, you're letting someone else speak in the middle of your discourse. That has its uses, of course, but it also risks confusing your reader about who's speaking and what relation the quoted words have to your own argument. Student writers are often oblivious to this risk because they're not used to looking at what they've written from a reader's point of view. But consider the problems your reader faces. He encounters quotations used for many different purposes: to support or amplify an argument, to raise a new point, to present a point of disagreement. Don't assume your reader will know why you're using a particular quotation.

　　There are two main problems of clarity in using quotations: （1） Distinguishing your own argument from the arguments of various quoted passages; and （2） making sure the reader understands what a quotation is expected to accomplish.

　　1. Distinguishing your own argument from the argument of a quotation

　　Often you'll wish to use quotations to summarize positions with which you'll disagree a little or a lot. This is especially likely to happen when you're surveying past studies or perspectives as a way of laying the groundwork for your own argument. Here's how one prominent literary critic, Stephen Greenblatt, deals with previous approaches to Shakespeare's plays:

　　Those plays have been described with impeccable intelligence as deeply conservative and with equally impeccable intelligence as deeply radical. Shakespeare, in Northrop Frye's words, is"a born courtier," the dramatist who organizes his representation of English history around the hegemonic mysticism of the Tudor myth; Shakespeare is also a relentless demystifier, an interrogator of ideology,"the only dramatist," as Franco Moretti puts it,"who rises to the level of Machiavelli in elaborating all the consequences of the separation of political praxis from moral evaluation." The conflict glimpsed here could be investigated, on a performance-by-performance basis. . . .

　　Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England （Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988）, 23.

　　Greenblatt wishes to call attention to the"conflict," as he calls it, between these two views of Shakespeare （conservative or radical）. He's not trying to argue that one or the other view is right, and so he crafts the passage to give each view equal weight. In the larger essay from which this excerpt is taken, Greenblatt develops his own perspective, an interpretive model that stresses"negotiation" and ambivalence rather than imposed and settled meaning.

　　Sometimes one will want to use a controversial source. The best tack is to set up the quotation in such a way that you show understanding of the controversy:

ORIGINAL
REVISION

Many Germans participated in genocide:"an enormous number of ordinary, representative Germans became—and most of their fellow Germans were fit to be—Hitler's willing executioners" (Goldhagen 454).
Scholars have long debated what degree of responsibility ordinary Germans bore for the Holocaust. For Daniel Goldhagen the answer is clear:"an enormous number of ordinary, representative Germans became—and most of their fellow Germans were fit to be—Hitler's willing executioners" (454).

　　The original presents Goldhagen's words without any cognizance of the controversy surrounding his argument. The revision, by contrast, takes note of the controversy. It may now go on to agree or disagree with Goldhagen, or take a more nuanced view. The key point is that it's created space for the writer's own view, rather than crowding that view and the quotation's perspective together.

　　2. Explaining the point or sense of a quotation

　　The other main problem of clarity that arises with quotations is to explain a quoted passage's point. This is especially important when the original text is ironic or carries some other non-obvious meaning. For example, the original passage below presents a quotation from Shakespeare's great villain, Iago, without doing anything to note its irony:

ORIGINAL
REVISION

Iago says to Othello,"Who steals my purse steals trash; . . . / . . . / But he that filches from me my good name / Robs me of that which not enriches him / And makes me poor indeed" (3.3.157-61).
Drawing Othello further into his web, Iago suggests that public embarrassment would be intolerable:"Who steals my purse steals trash; . . . / . . . / But he that filches from me my good name / Robs me of that which not enriches him / And makes me poor indeed" (3.3.157-61). Iago, of course, is utterly contradicting his earlier declamation to Cassio on the folly of reputation (2.3.256-61).

　　The revision does a much better job of helping the reader make sense of the quotation, its place in Shakespeare's play, and its function in the essay's argument.