Dialogue Inside a Quotation
A categorical issue
Here's the essential problem: quotation marks do two things.
But what if the quote you are using has both dialogue (when someone is speaking) and narration (just words)? What do you do with the quotation marks? Here's a sample from an essay:
While sitting around their campfire, Lennie begs George to tell him about the farm they plan to own some day. As George begins to tell the story for the ten-thousandth time, Lennie interrupts, saying “an' live off the fatta the lan'," Lennie shouted. "An' have rabbits. Go on, George! Tell about what we're gonna have in the garden and about the rabbits in the cages and about the rain in the winter and the stove, and how thick the cream is on the milk like you can hardly cut it. Tell about that George” ( Steinbeck 14).
Do you see the problem? Once we use those quotation marks to show that we are quoting Steinbeck, what do we do about the quotation marks he used in the original text? If we leave the passage above as it is, it looks like we added the bit in the middle that says "Lennie shouted," because it is outside the quotation marks, but we didn't add that. Steinbeck wrote it.
- They tell when someone is speaking
- They tell when you are taking text word-for-word from another source.
But what if the quote you are using has both dialogue (when someone is speaking) and narration (just words)? What do you do with the quotation marks? Here's a sample from an essay:
While sitting around their campfire, Lennie begs George to tell him about the farm they plan to own some day. As George begins to tell the story for the ten-thousandth time, Lennie interrupts, saying “an' live off the fatta the lan'," Lennie shouted. "An' have rabbits. Go on, George! Tell about what we're gonna have in the garden and about the rabbits in the cages and about the rain in the winter and the stove, and how thick the cream is on the milk like you can hardly cut it. Tell about that George” ( Steinbeck 14).
Do you see the problem? Once we use those quotation marks to show that we are quoting Steinbeck, what do we do about the quotation marks he used in the original text? If we leave the passage above as it is, it looks like we added the bit in the middle that says "Lennie shouted," because it is outside the quotation marks, but we didn't add that. Steinbeck wrote it.
The Solution
You have to get kind of mathematical: Remember how to use brackets and parentheses? They tell you the order in which to do your...math (sorry if my terms are a little off—I haven't taken a math class in a while...) Anyways, if you had something like [(3+2)X(5+3)+5]X3= you know that you have to first add 3+2 and 5+3 and then multiply the results together. You then add that number to 5 and THEN multiply the whole thing by 3.
You can do kind of the same thing with quotation marks.
You can do kind of the same thing with quotation marks.
The categories
Put full quotation marks around the entire quotation: " ".
If there are already quotation marks in the text you intend to quote, replace them with single quotation marks: ' '.
So, following these rules, the above passage would look like this:
While sitting around their campfire, Lennie begs George to tell him about the farm they plan to own some day. As George begins to tell the story for the ten-thousandth time, Lennie interrupts, saying “'an' live off the fatta the lan'', Lennie shouted. 'An' have rabbits. Go on, George! Tell about what we're gonna have in the garden and about the rabbits in the cages and about the rain in the winter and the stove, and how thick the cream is on the milk like you can hardly cut it. Tell about that George'” ( Steinbeck 14).
Notice that it looks like there are triple quotation marks at the beginning an end. That's because the dialogue is at the beginning of the quotation, so I used both " and ', resulting in "'.
The only tricky thing with this passage is with the dialect that turns land into lan', which in turn makes that work look like it has a regular quotation mark. If that were the case, though, then the word in question would actually be LAN, not land, and I doubt Lennie was interested in Local Area Networks. A better way to fix this particular quotation would be to simply remove the "Lennie shouted" bit, which feels awkward anyway, and replace it with ellipses (...), which would remove the need for fancy quotation mark acrobatics altogether, since now the entire thing would be dialogue.
If there are already quotation marks in the text you intend to quote, replace them with single quotation marks: ' '.
So, following these rules, the above passage would look like this:
While sitting around their campfire, Lennie begs George to tell him about the farm they plan to own some day. As George begins to tell the story for the ten-thousandth time, Lennie interrupts, saying “'an' live off the fatta the lan'', Lennie shouted. 'An' have rabbits. Go on, George! Tell about what we're gonna have in the garden and about the rabbits in the cages and about the rain in the winter and the stove, and how thick the cream is on the milk like you can hardly cut it. Tell about that George'” ( Steinbeck 14).
Notice that it looks like there are triple quotation marks at the beginning an end. That's because the dialogue is at the beginning of the quotation, so I used both " and ', resulting in "'.
The only tricky thing with this passage is with the dialect that turns land into lan', which in turn makes that work look like it has a regular quotation mark. If that were the case, though, then the word in question would actually be LAN, not land, and I doubt Lennie was interested in Local Area Networks. A better way to fix this particular quotation would be to simply remove the "Lennie shouted" bit, which feels awkward anyway, and replace it with ellipses (...), which would remove the need for fancy quotation mark acrobatics altogether, since now the entire thing would be dialogue.