How many quotations?
We should use some quotations but not too many. With no quotations an essay will lack the authority of the author’s word; with too many it will become a guide to quotable passages rather than our own work. It’s impossible to set any rigid minimum or maximum on the number of quotations allowable in an essay, but in general it should contain a minimum of four quotations and a maximum of two quotations of sentence length or longer per paragraph. With few exceptions no more than a quarter of the whole should be quoted material. Also, we should be sparing in our use of long quotations. In an essay of six to eight paragraphs, only once or twice at the most would we cite a quotation of several sentences. Otherwise, the reader’s concentration switches from the essay to the text, and he easily loses the thread of the essay’s argument. Limiting the quotations we use in the essay to ones we have included in our notes should help to prevent the use of too many lengthy passages. 6. Incorporating qu
