Many students think that all they need to do is introduce quotations one at a time:
Jones says, "Gerbil, gerbil, gerbil." Then he says, "Hamster, hamster, hamster." And then he says, "Ratfink, ratfink, ratfink."But when you're thinking about using quotations, think about ways to stack them up, to list them--to run them together in lists. Try out parentheses, bullets, semicolons, italics. Watch how people introduce them--particularly their punctuation marks. Check out how many times writers say "for example" and "says":
- The Lieblings did not perish; they languished. They lived across the hall from a chummy woman who suggested they leave the latch open "so we could wander in and out like one big family." They declined. They also did not much like the Chicago press ("The reader who stays on Chicago newspapers exclusively for a month [I made the experiment] feels, on seeing his first New York Times or Herald Tribune after the ordeal, like a diver returning to the light"), deplored the city's skimpy literary life ("At every party my wife and I went to in Chicago, we met Nelson Algren . . . For a city where, I am credibly informed, you couldn't throw an egg in 1925 without braining a great poet, Chicago is hard up for writers") and marveled at Chicagoans' warm nostalgia for the St. Valentine's Day Massacre of 1929, in which seven gangsters were lined up and shot by another mob in a garage ("Citizens of a city celebrated in the movies, [Chicago children] are little Scarfaces as they sit with their molls in the darkened cinemas and identify themselves with the glorious past"). [Raymond Sokolov, Wayward Reporter: The Life of A.J. Liebling (San Francisco: Donald S. Ellis, 1984), 226-27.]
- The scientists might discover in it a new and subversive technique for catching the attention of students driven by curiosity, delighted and surprised to learn that science is exactly as the American scientist and educator Vannevar Bush described it: an "endless frontier." [Lewis Thomas, "The Art of Teaching Science"]
- They say that characters were engraven on the bathing tub of King Tchingthang to this effect--"Renew thyself completely each day; do it again, and again, and forever again." I can understand that. [Henry David Thoreau, "Where I Lived, and What I Lived For"]
- I think sometimes, Why, this people mean well, they are only ignorant; they would do better if they knew how: why give your neighbors this pain to treat you as they are not inclined to? [Henry David Thoreau, "Civil Disobedience"]
- The No. 1 hit song of the collections this season was, hands down, "What Is Love?," by Deee-Lite, a trio that, appropriately, comes packaged in sixties psychedelia. How do you say de-licious? De-lovely? De-lectable? De- vine? Print jackets with Lycra leggings in the same print. Print bathing suits with shirts in coördinating prints. It's been seven hours and fifteen--print shirts--days--side slit, over tights--since you took your love away. Dresses with very full, very short skirts, and with pockets constructed to stand away at the hip. I just want your extra time and your-- A silk shirt-jacket printed with the covers of recent issues of American Vogue, featuring Madonna, Ivana Trump, and several of the models in the show. Pants with James Dean's face silk-screened on one thigh. A dress printed with a crowd in which every face is Marilyn Monroe's. A short dress with a long Vogue-printed train that is lined with stripes. A beaded translucent unitard with more Vogue covers, placed like fig leaves. Versace himself, taking a curtan call. I've got the power! [Holly Brubach, "In Fashion," The New Yorker, December 31, 1990, p. 75.]
- Jean Paul Gaultier presented a show best described as sweet: Adam, with long hair, and Eve, with a crewcut, promenaded around the Garden of Eden under a large, leaf-covered umbrella with an apple hanging from its spokes. The voice of M.C. Hammer: You can't touch this. They eat. Thunder, lightning, and the voice of God decreeing that "as punishment, you will have to wear Gaultier's clothes for the rest of your life." I believe in the power of love. The models came out in pairs. A woman in a black-and-white floral-printed leotard and stockings that kept sliding down--no garters--accompanied by a man who walked along pulling them up for her. [Holly Brubach, "In Fashion," The New Yorker, December 31, 1990, pp. 78-79.]
- Evidence of Englehard's foolishness are all over the place:
Blah blah blah. Ho ho ho.and:
Greeble breeble goggledy gooooooo. So amstad rhemish.and:
Sassafroonble in the tommbs. Whynot the way it was? It was?- Englehard stupidities:
(a)>Blah blah blah. Ho ho ho.and:
(b)Greeble breeble goggledy gooooooo. So amstad rhemish.and:
(c)Sassafroonble in the tommbs. Whynot the way it was? It was?