Using Textual Evidence Correctly: The Hill We Chose to Die On
One of Steph’s tutoring students was writing a paper on Macbeth this week, which means Steph had to say, “No . . . move the period after the citation. No, after . . . now go back and add a space” about 70 bazillion times.
There are few things that cause our students more grief than the requirement that they not only use textual evidence to support their claims but that they use textual evidence correctly.
It’s challenging enough for many of them to find textual evidence that appropriately supports a claim. Then, they have to explain how that textual evidence supports their claim because no, dear student, it isn’t obvious. Then, as they struggle to write commentary, they realize that they’ve chosen evidence that tells rather than shows, leaving them with nothing to say. And then on top of all that, they have to memorize a whole set of pesky and nitpicky rules about punctuating textual evidence that leave many of them asking, “Why bother?” or “Who cares?”
For years, this drove us absolutely bananas. “How hard is it,” we’d ask each other in frustration, “to put the period inside the quotation mark?”
After beating our heads against the metaphorical wall, we decided we’d had enough, and we made it our mission to ensure that our students, even if they learned nothing else from us, would know how to punctuate, cite, and integrate textual evidence correctly.
With this as our mission, we became firm believers in the value of teaching students how to use textual evidence correctly, not just “because there’s a right way to do it,” but because it’s a tangible skill that greatly enhances the quality of their writing, no matter what level of class they’re in.
Why Does Using Textual Evidence Correctly Matter?
If we’re being honest, younger, new teacher Kate and Steph would have said that using textual evidence correctly matters because rules are there for a reason, and by God, you will follow them if it kills us.

Older, wiser, post-burnout Kate and Steph still value rules, but we’re also a lot more pragmatic about prioritizing what’s most necessary for our students to know and what effort is going to pay off most.
One reason it matters so much that our students learn to use textual evidence correctly is that doing so leads to clean writing. This is one of those things that you don’t even notice when it’s done well but that wildly distracts when it’s not. When students use punctuation incorrectly and all manner of clunky methods to integrate quotations (if they don’t just drop them in), we’re very aware that we’re reading the work of immature writers. When we then read an essay from a student who’s done it right, it’s a breath of fresh air.
More importantly, however, it establishes our students’ credibility as writers. We’ve always known that we’re far more likely to take someone seriously when their writing isn’t riddled with spelling and grammar mistakes, but teaching AP Seminar and AP Research has really hammered this point home for Steph.
Student writers are expected to rely on the nitpicky rules of style guides not as a means of torture or because college professors are completely unreasonable. It’s because at the highest levels of academia, researchers must prove they are experts in their field whose work deserves to be taken seriously. And whether our students reach the furthest end of that academic path, they’re on that path for now, and adhering to the rules of their discipline (the Modern Language Association in our case) is part of their job.
No matter what level our students are, learning to write effectively and correctly allows them to communicate, “I know what I’m doing, and you should listen to me.”
Why Is Textual Evidence a Worthwhile Priority?
It’s one thing to recognize that there’s value in teaching students to use textual evidence correctly. It’s another thing to take that battle on when there are so.many.other.things. our students need to learn and it takes them forever to master any one skill.
There are three key reasons that we think teaching students to punctuate, cite, and integrate textual evidence correctly is worthy of your time:
1. It’s a skill that students can master in one school year.
So many of the skills we teach in English are cumulative: students started learning them in kindergarten and have just scaled them up every year since. We feel like we’re starting from scratch every year, and it often feels like our students haven’t made much progress before summer arrives and they forget it all over again. But this is something small that any student can improve on, and if it’s something you practice repeatedly, it’s something they’ll remember.

One of our colleagues inherited many of our 9th grade honor students, who got the full force of our determination to teach this skill. She shared, “Those students are now in my 10th grade honors class, and I have noticed a HUGE difference in how much work I have to do in teaching them the correct way to cite their sources. Thank you ladies.” It was one of the greatest compliments we received as teachers!
2. It leads to massive gains in the quality of their writing.
When students start punctuating quotations correctly, and even more so, when they start integrating quotations effectively, their writing improves overall. By refusing to accept work that didn’t follow the rules, we made (most) students decide they had to figure it out, and by teaching students four methods to integrate their quotations, we modeled sentence variety and more sophisticated structures that transferred to all their writing, not just their concrete evidence sentences.
This is a relatively simple focus that leads to great gains. Highly recommend!
3. It’s a valuable skill no matter what our students do in the future.
This is a skill students will use all through high school and college. And if they are in a job that requires any kind of writing, they’ll stand out when they’re able to write cleanly.
Okay, you might be thinking, you’ve convinced me there’s value in this. But what does teaching students to use textual evidence correctly even entail?
7 Rules for Punctuating Textual Evidence Correctly
1. Punctuation at the End of a Quotation
Periods and commas go inside quotation marks. Colons and semicolons go outside quotation marks. Question marks and exclamation marks go inside when they’re part of the quotation and outside when they’re part of the student’s sentence.
The narrator shares that the father “took” few monetary tips but “took” plenty “from a liquid point of view,” suggesting that the father was regularly drinking up his earnings (27).
Nathaniel Hawthorne leaves readers to wonder whether Young Goodman Brown’s near-baptism at a “witch-meeting” was “only . . . a wild dream”: there is evidence to support multiple interpretations.
The reader is informed the child’s grandmother is “unwilling,” which makes it no surprise that when he struggled to transition to solid foods, she “contracted habits of shaking” him until he vomited (26)!
Young Goodman Brown, as he walked deeper into the forest with the old man, suddenly yelled, “Too far, too far!” (301).
2. Using Parenthetical Citations
All quotations must be cited in parentheses at the end of the sentence (not in the middle), and end punctuation goes after (not before) the citation (and certainly not in both places).
The author’s name is included in the parentheses only if multiple sources are discussed within the same paper. Otherwise, students only need to include the page, paragraph, or line number, as appropriate. If the author’s name is included, it is separated from the location by a space, not a comma: (Author #). If multiple quotations are included within the same sentence, the location is separated by a comma.
Although Mr. Collins fears being “run away with by [his] feelings” for Elizabeth, he quickly outlines his reasons for marrying, none of which suggest he has any feelings at all for her, and concludes with his assurances regarding the “violence of [his] affection” for her (16, 17).
In a paper with multiple sources, the example would look like this:
Although Mr. Collins fears being “run away with by [his] feelings” for Elizabeth, he quickly outlines his reasons for marrying, none of which suggest he has any feelings at all for her, and concludes with his assurances regarding the “violence of [his] affection” for her (Austen 16, 17).
3. Quotation Within a Quotation
Single quotation marks are used to indicate that there is a quotation within a quotation. This is the only time single quotation marks should be used.
As Friar Lawrence broke the news of Prince Escalus’s mercy, explaining Romeo had been banished following Tybalt’s death, Romeo angrily exploded, “Ha, banishment? Be merciful, say ‘death,’ / For exile hath more terror in his look, / Much more than death. Do not say ‘banishment’” (3.3.13–15).
4. Omitting Part of a Quotation
An ellipsis is used to indicate that words have been removed from a quotation.
Fun Fact! When word processors autocorrect an ellipsis, it’s not exactly right. An ellipsis should be three periods, each preceded and followed by a space: . . .
It’s rare that an ellipsis is necessary at the beginning or end of a quotation. Other punctuation marks (periods, commas, etc.) are used in conjunction with an ellipsis when the removed material is at the end of a sentence or clause.
As the narrator watched the image of a cathedral scroll by on the screen, he lamely began, “They reach way up. . . . Toward the sky” (526).
5. Changing Words in a Quotation
While it is preferable to rewrite the sentence to avoid the necessity of doing this, sometimes it is necessary to alter or add a word for the sentence with the integrated quotation to make grammatical sense (or to make it clear whom a pronoun refers to). In this case, the altered letter(s), word, or phrase should be surrounded by square brackets [ ], and the bracketed word should replace the original word, not be added to it.
After biting his tongue as Elizabeth vehemently rejected his proposal, Darcy lashed out, claiming his “faults, according to this calculation, are heavy indeed! But perhaps . . . these offences might have been overlooked, had not [Elizabeth’s] pride been hurt by [his] honest confession” (165).
6. Quoting Poetry and Plays
When students quote poetry and plays, there are a couple additional rules to follow.
Students should use a slash mark ( / ) preceded and followed by a space to indicate a line break when quoting poetry or plays written in verse (like Shakespeare).
Upon reflection, the speaker concludes, “Of all the things that happened there / That’s all I remember” (11–12).
The parenthetical citation for plays includes the Arabic number for the act, scene, and line(s), all separated by a period: (3.1.12–15).
If an entire line is removed from a quotation, a slash should be added before and after the ellipsis.
Brutus is determined to avoid any unnecessary, and thus dishonorable, bloodshed: ‘Our course will seem too bloody, Caius Cassius, / To cut the head off and then hack the limbs, / . . . / For Antony is but a limb of Caesar” (2.1.175–78).
7. Correctly Punctuating Titles
Italics are used to punctuate the titles of longer works when typing while underlining is used to punctuate these same titles when handwriting.
Italics should be used for titles of magazines, newspapers, books, academic journals, plays, films, radio and television programs, epic poems, ballets, operas, lengthy musical compositions (including albums), legal cases, the names of ships and aircraft, scientific names, and foreign words.
Quotation marks are used to punctuate the titles of shorter works: songs, short stories, poems, lectures, episodes of radio and television programs, chapters of books, and articles from periodicals (magazines, newspapers, encyclopedias, academic journals).
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4 Strategies for Integrating Textual Evidence Correctly
We despise a drop-in quotation, but we’ve learned that students need instruction and modeling in how to integrate a quotation correctly. These are the four methods we taught them to use:
Method 1: Introduce the quotation with a complete sentence followed by a colon.
The rulers and elders in Mbanta were confronted with a situation they had not faced before, the deliberate killing of a sacred python: “No punishment was prescribed for a man who killed the python knowingly. Nobody thought such a thing could ever happen” (91).
Method 2: Introduce the quotation with an introductory or explanatory phrase, followed by a comma and then the quote.
Heck Tate stubbornly argued, “Let the dead bury the dead this time, Mr. Finch. Let the dead bury the dead” (317).
Method 3: Make the quotation a part of your own sentence without any punctuation between your own words and the words you are using. In order to do this, you often use a “signal phrase” like “that.”
When the narrator realizes the letter she is waiting for will never arrive, she also recognizes that “[t]here were women just waiting and waiting by mailboxes for one letter or another” (140).
Method 4: Use short quotations—only a few words—as part of your own sentence.
Mrs. Das, the daughter of Indian immigrants, returned to her parents’ homeland fully Americanized, flashing “shaved, largely bare legs” beneath a “red-and-white-checkered skirt” which did not touch her knees (141, 143).
10 Strategies for Teaching Students to Use Textual Evidence Correctly
As we increased our focus on teaching students to punctuate, cite, and integrate textual evidence correctly, we developed a series of strategies that helped us make a difference in our students’ writing.
You can purchase materials for all of these strategies in our Embedding Quotes in Writing mini-resource (and we’re specifically referencing those materials below), but you can implement these strategies with any MLA resources!
Explicitly teach the rules and methods to students.
We provided our students with a “Scholar’s Guide to Quotations” that they were instructed to keep in their binder at all times since they’d be referencing it throughout the year. We assigned them to read the guide and, since we didn’t trust them to do so, we created a guided reading assignment to check for understanding as they went through it.
Some students will need more explicit instruction: if this is your students, we’d recommend breaking up the rules and methods and covering one at a time so students don’t get overwhelmed.
Require students to punctuate, cite, and integrate textual evidence correctly in short-answer responses.
Once we decided to make this our focus, it became a mandatory requirement for every written assignment in our class, including short-answer responses. We used Actively Learn regularly for guided reading assignments, and we started kicking back responses unread with a score of zero if students didn’t correctly punctuate, cite, and integrate their quotation.
Early in the year, we referred them to the specific rule or method they hadn’t followed correctly, but as the year went on, we simply told them to check their guide.
Work on one rule or integration strategy at a time.
Because we mostly used this approach with our honors students (see #9 for our strategy with lower-level students), we expected them to be able to follow Rules #1–7 from the beginning.
But the four integration strategies were more challenging, so we focused on one at a time. We would specify which method we wanted students to use in a response, which helped them to focus. By the end of the fall semester, most students were able to use all four methods comfortably.

Assign practice fixing errors in Rules #1–7.
Many years, we gave students a grammar worksheet with incorrectly punctuated and cited quotations and had them practice identifying and fixing those errors. It’s a relatively quick and easy way to practice the skill when students are first learning or to review the skill when students start slipping.
Practice integrating famous quotations.
When we first introduced the four methods for integrating quotations, we Googled a selection of quotations from celebrities and had students practice integrating those quotations into a sentence using each of the four methods. Sometimes they corrected each other’s work, and sometimes we corrected their work, but it was low-stakes practice.
Practice integrating quotations from a variety of texts.
We leveled up the “famous quotations” practice by providing students with quotations from literature. We included the title, author, speaker, and a page (or line) number, and required them to use all those pieces correctly (our biggest concern here was the citation).
Quiz students on the rules/methods and their application.
We started giving students a quiz to hold them accountable for knowing the Scholar’s Guide to Quotations. It helped motivate them to actually learn the material and sent the message that we considered it important.
Provide students with a list of verbs to use instead of “said.”
We all, as English teachers, know that “said” is overused, but students don’t always know what word to use instead. We started providing them with a list (and a reminder to look up words they didn’t know to ensure they were using them correctly).
Provide students with a model to follow.
Since our Pre-AP and AP students had the guide, they had plenty of examples of each rule (and nuance) and method.
We knew our lower-level students would be overwhelmed by this, so we provided them with an example of a correctly punctuated and cited quotation directly on assignments where we wanted students to provide textual evidence. Similarly to our more advanced students, we sent the responses back for revision when students didn’t follow the model.
In more formal writing assignments, we also provided these students with sentence starters so they could start to learn how to effectively integrate their quotations in their writing.
Ban advanced students from using immature structures.
With younger students, we were just happy to get a quotation that wasn’t a drop-in. But once our Pre-AP and AP students started to get more familiar with the four methods for integrating quotations, we stopped allowing them to integrate quotations with variations on “In X, Y says, . . .” Forcing them to use more mature methods to integrate their quotations helped them to start making noticeable improvements.
Correct punctuation, citation, and integration of textual evidence may have been a ridiculous hill to choose to die on. But we’re happy with our decision. Writing can be so subjective and complex, and giving our students a finite list of strategies that we expected them to use in their writing (and to practice over and over) allowed all of us to see tangible improvements in their writing. The confidence boost our students experienced as they got it was just as important as the actual skill.
If you’d like a preview of our guide, you can find the portion detailing the 7 rules for punctuating quotations in our Free Resource Library. We explain each rule in more detail than we do here, addressing some of the nuanced issues that arise, and we provide multiple examples for each one. If you like what you see (or are already interested), you can purchase the integration portion of the guide or our mini-unit, which includes digital and print versions of the full guide, guided reading questions, three practice activities, and a quiz, all with answer keys. You can also purchase this bundled with our 5C paragraph mini-lesson if you really want to level up students’ academic writing.
Let us know how it goes! We’d love to hear from you at [email protected] or on Instagram @threeheads.works.