Quoting too much

Quoting too much is one of the commonest mistakes inexperienced writers make, as if they think it's disrespectful to an original text to cut it into small pieces. But there's nothing disrespectful about helping a quote make an emphatic point. Whenever you quote, be aware of what you're looking for, and try to seize upon a sharp and pithy excerpt:

　　If the Piazza del Duomo is the spiritual heart of Florence, the Piazza della Signoria is its secular heart; D. H. Lawrence called it "the perfect center of the human world."

　　Barbara Grizzuti Harrison, Italian Days （New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1989）, 135.

　　Marlowe's Machiavelli calls religion a "childish toy."

　　One needn't go as far as Ralph Waldo Emerson's flat-out disdain for quotations, but make sure that your essays don't look like patchwork quilts. Be selective in the quotations you use, and be selective in what you quote from them, keeping only the heart of the quotation as much as possible and keeping the rest of the paper in your own voice and words.