Nerdify Reviews the List of 6 Steps for Finding Quotes for Your Essays
In making a compelling argument for an essay, you must include supporting evidence for your claims. This entails finding passages from your primary source, but the process for doing so can be complicated and vague, leaving students unsure of where to start. Below, our Nerdify reviews experts have outlined some steps you can take to streamline the process of finding the most effective quotes for your next paper.
1. Take Notes When Reading Your Primary Source
While it might seem like a lot of extra work to take notes while reading texts for a class, you’ll be saving yourself time in the long run. Your thoughts on a passage will be fresh on your mind if you write them down upon first reading, which will help you later brainstorm a thesis statement. Many users on Reddit say that the most frustrating part of an essay is trying to track down a quote that they’ve lost track of in the hundreds of pages of text, so taking notes will alleviate this cumbersome step. Now, the notes you take don’t have to be very detailed — you can just highlight notable quotes, or write little annotations in the margin. Some terrific marginalia to write could involve character development, symbolism, motifs, or themes the work explores, recommend Nerdify reviews experts.
2. Decide on Your Thesis Statement
Once you read over the notes you’d taken when first reading your primary source, take time to think of something unique you have to say about this work. If it is in the literary canon, you might feel intimidated that you have nothing new to say that hasn’t already been exhausted. Still, you might surprise yourself by being able to bring a particular perspective to a piece. Make sure the thesis statement you choose is a strong one that could be argued for or against and one that you can support with primary and secondary sources.
3. Decide the Key Evidence That Supports Your Thesis
Now that you have a thesis in mind, it’s time to jot down your critical pieces of evidence for your argument. The number of pieces of evidence you’ll need will depend on your paper’s length, says Nerdify reviews team. Suppose you have been assigned a five-page paper. Since most people usually write two paragraphs per page, this means that you’ll have ten total sections. With your introduction and conclusion counting as two of them, this means that you’ll need eight other pieces of evidence that will have their own paragraph.
4. Go Back To Your Primary Source for Quotes
Now that you have passages in mind that you want to cite, you need to go back and find the quotes you plan to integrate. Hopefully, you had highlighted passages you’d found vital, so they are easier to track down for you. Especially if the source you are citing consists of hundreds of pages, finding the specific quote you are looking for can be challenging. A tip a student on Reddit recommended would be to search if you can find an e-book version of your source. From there, the Reddit user said, do a “find” command to look for words you can remember from the quote you want.
5. Research Secondary Articles
Now that you have your pieces of evidence sorted, you can now look around for secondary sources to give validity to your claims. Finding secondary sources should not be difficult if you are working with a popular piece of literature. Most academic journal databases will have abstracts for their essays, where the author includes a brief paragraph going over their paper’s primary structure and argument. Look at this first before you waste your time reading the entirety of an article, only to find you don’t think it is relevant to your essay.
6. Choose Secondary Article Quotes
Once you’ve got the essays you’ve chosen to cite, you need to select the quotes you plan on including in your paper. For the passages you like, mark down your favorites, perhaps even making a list of them. Then, Nerdify reviews team suggests divvying up the quotes and marking down which paragraph of your essay will include which section. That way, you won’t be scrambling close to the due date to go back and find more quotes. Make sure you cite a secondary source in each of your paragraphs — whether finding a different secondary source for each section or citing the same secondary source multiple times.
