KEY ESSAY WRITING SKILLS
Embedding and contextualising evidence (part 2)
how to embed quotations into their context
This is part 2 of our 2-part series on embedding and contextualising evidence. It will explain some different ways to embed quotations into sentences that provide context for the quotation. There is a quiz at the end to test yourself on this key skill.
Contents of this guide
Quick links for this skill
Other guides in this series:
Recapping some key concepts from part 1 of the series
In the previous part of this series we established the following things:
That the evidence part of a paragraph is made up of a quotation plus the context of that quotations.
That you need to put your quotations into context in order to ensure you don’t misinterpret them, and to make your argument more convincing.
That the context for a quotation will explain what is going on in the text at that point, which will include at least the sentence from which the quotation comes, if not more information.
Now we need to look at choosing what quotations to include and how to actually go about embedding them into the context-setting sentence.
How to embed your quotations
Once you’ve decided the context for your quotation, you need to figure out how to combine it with the quotation itself. This is where the embedding comes in. Your goal (most of the time) is to write a single grammatically correct sentence which includes both the context for your quotations and the quotations themselves. Exactly how you do this will depend slightly on what you are quoting.
Embedding quotations from regular prose (fiction or non-fiction) and poetry
This method will work for most of the texts that you have to write about. Your context will generally come first, with the quotation at the end. For example:
When Peter sees the haunted house from the end of the driveway, he “starts with fear.”
If you want to include multiple short quotations from the same part of a text in the same piece of evidence that is fine. It’s good practice, in fact. This will mean your evidence becomes a mixture of context and quotation across a longer sentence. For example:
When Peter sees the haunted house from the end of the driveway, he “starts with fear” before “steeling himself” and walking through the gate.
In this example, there are two quotations (one showing Peter’s fear and one showing his subsequent bravery), both of which would be discussed in the analysis (see below for more information on this).
As these examples show, ‘when’ is a very useful way to begin the context for your quotations. You’ll need to be careful, though. There must be actual context after the when, and not just a quotation. Here’s an example which starts with ‘when’ but doesn’t actually provide any context:
When Peter “starts with fear” he “steel[s] himself” and walks through the gate.
Where is Peter? What’s going on? What’s the cause of his fear? There’s no context to provide answers to these questions. Just putting ‘when’ at the start of your evidence doesn’t guarantee that you’ve got context.
Finally, using ‘when’ is far from the only way you can phrase your context. You don’t want your analytical writing to become formulaic. Here is another way of phrasing the earlier example about Peter and the haunted house:
Although Peter is initially scared as he approaches the haunted house, “starting with fear” at the sight of it, he “steel[s] himself” before walking through the gate.
Having some variety in the way you contextualise your evidence will help make your analytical writing more sophisticated.
Embedding quotations from direct speech or from play scripts
For this you’ve got two options for embedding the words a character says. The first is to turn the direct speech into indirect speech and embed the quotation that way, similar to the method above:
When Peter collects his GCSE results, he tells his mother that he has “never been so happy” and that “something must have gone wrong at the exam board.”
Here, the quotations are both from Peter’s direct speech, but they’ve been turned into indirect speech and just embedded into a sentence.
The second approach for this kind of evidence is to embed direct speech quotations using the direct speech conventions from narrative writing. For example:
“I’ve never been so happy in my life,” Peter tells his mother when he collects his GCSE results. “Something must have gone wrong at the exam board.”
Here, we’ve got essentially the same quotations and context as in the first example, but it is presented as direct speech rather than indirect speech. Admittedly, it’s two sentences rather than one, but that’s fine if you’re using this method for embedding.
Embedding character description
Another potentially tricky type of quotation to embed is descriptive words or phrases, without actions or words to go with them. Consider this description of Scrooge from the very start of A Christmas Carol:
Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster…
How would you embed and contextualise a quotation from this? We don’t really need to worry about what’s going on at this point in the story (nothing is going on, plot-wise), so instead you can just use a phrase like “is described as” to introduce your quotations. This is fine. You should also say where in the text the description occurs to help give it more context.
At the start of the novel, Scrooge is described as “a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone” who is as “hard and sharp as flint.”
Seamlessly embedding quotations
To really master this skill, you need to be able to embed your quotations seamlessly. To help you understand what this means, let’s look at an example of a quotation and some context that are not seamlessly embedded:
When Peter first arrives at the football game, it says “I smiled from ear to ear and hugged my mum.”
This is not really embedded evidence: there is context, and there is a quotation, but they are very separate. If someone were to read this out loud, you would know exactly which part was in quotation marks, without having to see it written down. This is what you want to avoid. There are 3 separate problems here:
‘It says’ – you need to avoid this phrase at all costs in your analytical writing
The quotation is in the 1st person (I/my) but the context is in the 3rd person (Peter)
The quotation is in the past tense (smiled/hugged) but the context is in the present tense (arrives), as it should be.
The first problem is easy to fix: we can use the regular quotations method outlined above, giving us this:
When Peter first arrives at the football game, “I smiled from ear to ear and hugged my mum”
That gets rid of it says, but it’s not much better. In fact, it’s probably worse as it makes even less grammatical sense now. We need to deal with the person and the tense. The way to do this is to use square brackets. This is how you signal that you’ve changed something inside a quotation. Using square brackets, we can change the pronoun, determiners (e.g. my) and the verb tense so the overall sentence is grammatically correct:
When Peter first arrives at the football game, “[he] smile[s] from ear to ear and hug[s] [his] mum.”
Now we have a perfectly grammatical sentence. If this were read aloud, there is no way you could tell which part was in quotation marks and which part was not. However, it’s still not quite perfect as a piece of evidence. We don’t really need that “[he]” at the start of the quotation - it’s a bit clunky. There’s no need to put the first word of any quotation in square brackets – we can just take it out of the quotation marks instead. Giving us this seamlessly embedded quotation.
When Peter first arrives at the football game, he “smile[s] from ear to ear and hug[s] [his] mum.”
That’s better!
What quotations you should embed, if any
The final part of this process, which we’ve not covered in much detail so far, is deciding which bits of a text to actually quote in your evidence. Which parts of a text do you quote and which parts do you include in the context?
The first thing you need to decide here is whether you need to include a quotation at all. The evidence part of a PEA paragraph can take two possible forms:
Context + specific reference(s)
Context + quotation(s)
We’ll look briefly at each of these forms now, though the focus of this guide is very much on the second one.
1. When to include a specific reference without a quotation
Sometimes you don’t need a quotation in your evidence. This will generally be because you want to analyse a lot of different things in a text all together, rather than a particular word or phrase. For example, you might want to discuss in your essay the way that a character has changed: he used to do things like this and this, but by the end he does things like this. In these situations, a quotation isn’t always necessary, and trying to put one in can make life more difficult for you.
Consider the example below. We have a point (in italics) and some evidence that uses several specific references, but no quotations:
Shakespeare uses Macbeth’s early kingship to emphasise the extent to which power can corrupt a person. Macbeth is a totally changed man at the start of Act 3, plotting to murder his best friend, manipulating the feeble murderers into do his bidding by questioning their manhood and keeping all of his diabolical plans a secret from his wife.
You should be able to see that it would be hard to do evidence like this with a quotation, and any quotation you did include would probably be superfluous.
At GCSE, the exam board give marks for what they call specific references, which can include quotations but can also include summarised references to the plot, like in the example above. Sometimes you will want your evidence to include just references and no quotations. This is especially true when you are doing closed-book examinations (like the English Literature GCSE) when you won’t have the text to refer to and can’t be expected to memorise all the words in a novel or a play. We discuss this idea in more detail in this guide, which is aimed specifically at students who are doing GCSEs.
Most of the time, however, you will want quotations in your evidence for reasons that we will explain now.
2. When to include a quotation - and what quotation to include
You should include quotations when the words from the text neatly show the thing you want to discuss in your analysis, or, more often, when there are specific words or phrases that you want to analyse, either for methods or for big ideas. In these instances, you should quote only the parts of the text that you want to analyse and include everything else as part of the context-setting sentence.
Let’s look at a quick example to make this clearer. Imagine you wanted to analyse this bit of a text, focussing on the way the setting is presented.
There was a drab corridor facing her, with a porter's office on the right, where an old man sat in front of a fire reading a Penny Dreadful.
You wouldn’t want to quote all of those words in your essay - there are too many. So you’d just choose the ones you wanted to analyse and quote those, putting them into context using the other words in this sentence, and the relevant bits from elsewhere in the text.
So you’d look at the sentence and ask yourself, which words or phrases are most relevant and meaningful? In other words, which words would I want to really focus on discussing in my analysis?
For this example, you might well choose “drab corridor” and “old man reading a Penny Dreadful” as they’re both quite interesting and meaningful. So, including the relevant context from elsewhere in the text (e.g. who the ‘her’ refers to, and where the corridor is), you would end up with an evidence sentence like this.
When Ruby first arrives at the offices of Lockhart and Selby, she finds herself in a “drab corridor” with an “old man reading a Penny Dreadful.”
You would then need to go on to analyse “drab corridor” (perhaps especially the adjective ‘drab’) plus the image of an old man reading a magazine of scary stories (a Penny Dreadful).
The key principle here is that you should analyse everything you quote. Do not quote anything that you don’t plan to analyse in the remainder of the paragraph, either for its implied meaning or for any methods or big ideas it contains. Quote the sections you want to analyse and leave the rest unquoted but summarised in your context setting sentence.
Summing up - key things to remember when writing your evidence
Evidence = context + quotation(s) OR context + specific reference(s) [GCSE only]
Context = what’s going on in the text at the time the quotation occurs
Context is necessary because it avoids misinterpretation and makes your argument more convincing
Your evidence should generally be a single, grammatically correct sentence, though it is okay to use more than one sentence from time to time
Context should go before the quotation - ‘when’ is a very useful word for beginning the context part of an evidence sentence
There are special ways that you can contextualise direct speech and description
If you embed your evidence seamlessly, it will be hard/impossible for somebody to tell, when hearing the sentence read out loud, which parts are quotations and which parts are context
You can use square brackets to change parts of your quotation to embed it seamlessly
You should only quote the parts of the text that you plan to analyse - leave everything else summarised in the context-setting sentence. Everything you quote must be discussed in your analysis.