When should you include a direct quote from an expert in your research report?

Our new Mentor Text series spotlights writing from The Times that students can learn from and emulate.

This entry aims to help support those participating in our STEM-writing contest, in which students are invited to choose an issue or question in science, technology, engineering, math or health that interests them, then write a 500-word explanation that will engage and enlighten readers.

For even more on how to help your students write interesting, clear and meaningful informational pieces, please see our relatedwriting unit.

Overview

All informational journalism quotes experts and stakeholders. That’s the journalist’s job — to gather information from a range of sources so that the resulting article is authoritative and balanced.

Page or click through The Times or any other news source and you’ll see. You would of course expect front-page articles about serious issues to reference multiple perspectives the way this one on the coronavirus does, quoting patients, Chinese officials,public health experts and scientists who study virology.But if you check out pieces from sections like Style and Sports, you’ll notice the same. Whether you’re reading a piece on social-media influencers or skateboarding, you’ll see that the writer has included a range of points of view.

If you’re writing your own piece, perhaps for our contest, you might be wondering, how do you choose the right people to quote? How do you use the information they give you? Even if you’re not conducting live interviews the way journalists do, any research-based writing task requires you to learn how to weave in the information you find in books or other sources. So when do you quote and when do you paraphrase? How do you do both of those things seamlessly?

For this edition of Mentor Texts, we’ve chosen to spotlight the short, engaging Tip column that appears weekly in the Magazine. Here’s why it’s so useful:

• It is written to a practical and engaging formula, one you are welcome to follow if you are participating in our STEM-writing contest.

• The column is usually no more than 400 words long. Since our contest gives you only 500 words to work with, Tip can show you how to impart a wealth of interesting information in just a few paragraphs.

• Because it is so short, each edition is built around an interview with a single expert. Noting what expert the author, Malia Wollan, chooses and how she uses the resulting information can help you see when to quote and when to paraphrase, and teach you how to do both gracefully.

Here are some ways to do that.

First: Spot the Pattern

Choose three articles from the Tip column, whichever you think will interest you most.

For instance, you might choose …

• How to survive a shark attack, rip current, flu pandemic or bear encounter.

• How to build a sand castle, moat, bat box or latrine.

• Or, how to thwart facial recognition, prepare yourself for space, attract butterflies, talk to dogs, or find a four-leaf clover.

After you’ve read three, answer these questions: What do you notice about the structure of a Tip column? That is, what predictable elements can readers expect to find in every edition?

Next: Examine Three Short Mentor Texts

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If you went through the exercise above, you no doubt noticed this pattern:

• The first line of all Tip articles is a quote from an expert. (For example, “Hit the shark in the eyes and gills,” says Sarah Waries, the chief executive of Shark Spotters, an organization in Cape Town that employs 30 specialists to scan the city’s beaches with binoculars from the cliffs and sound the alarm when they see one in the water.”)

• That same expert gives background and advice throughout the piece. (“It’s critical to stop the bleeding,” Waries says.)

• The expert also usually gets the last word in the form of a final, fitting quote. (“Sharks are everywhere,” Waries says. “They’re in all the oceans.”)

Below are three STEM-focused articles from this column that we have chosen as mentors. We’ve excerpted the first paragraph of each, but please read them all in full.

“How to Enjoy Snowflakes”:

“It’s easier to appreciate snowflakes when you don’t have a shovel in your hand,” says Kenneth G. Libbrecht, a professor of physics at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif., who studies snowflake morphology by growing ice crystals in his laboratory. Go out in the snow with dark clothing on and let a few flakes fall on your coat. Peer at them through a magnifying glass. Don’t assume you’ll see the archetypal, branching-star type called stellar dendrites, which require temperatures around minus 15 degrees Celsius. To see those in the wild, Libbrecht travels to a small town in northeastern Ontario. “The people there think I’m crazy,” he says.

“How to Hold a Venomous Snake”:

‘‘The snake will defecate on you,’’ says Jim Harrison, who extracts venom from approximately 1,000 snakes every week for use in drug research and development. Learn to ignore the stink. Collecting venom requires pinching a snake firmly behind its skull until it clamps its fangs over a sterile collection vial; snakes will squirt excreta in an effort to escape. ‘‘When I’m done extracting the cobras, I’m covered in feces and my wife won’t come close to me,’’ Harrison says.

“How to Fast”:

“Fasting is mental over physical, just like basketball and most other stuff in life,” says Enes Kanter, the 6-foot-11 center for the Portland Trail Blazers. Raised in Turkey, Kanter, 27, is a Muslim who has fasted from sunrise to sunset during the month of Ramadan since he was 8. This season, Ramadan aligned with the N.B.A. playoffs, so Kanter fasted through seven playoff games. During the year he forgoes food and water a day or two a week. “Don’t be scared to try it,” he says.

Now, answer these questions:

• Whom does the writer quote in each of these columns? Why do you think the author chose them? Do you think they were good sources of information?

• Look closely at when the author chooses to quote the experts and when she paraphrases the information they gave her. What is the difference? Why do you think she chose to quote the lines she did? Give some examples from the pieces to explain your reasoning.

• What do you notice about how she works in quotations? How does she introduce them so they make sense and add a little color? For instance, the second paragraph of “How to Hold a Venomous Snake” begins this way: “Unless you’re a trained venom extractor, don’t pick up a snake with your hands. Even zookeepers and herpetologists keep out of striking distance by scooping speci­mens up with a pole called a snake hook. ‘Everybody thinks they know what they’re doing because they saw it on YouTube,’ Harrison says.” How do the first two sentences give practical information that leads us into the YouTube quote? How does that quote add a bit of humor to the piece?

• Finally, look closely at the quotes that begin and end each piece. How would you describe the differences? Would the quotes work if they were flipped? What about any quotes you find in the middle paragraphs of these pieces? What observations can you make in general about the structure of a Tip column and how quotations work to build that structure?

Before you go, one last thing to notice. You may have been taught in school to cite your sources by using footnotes, or by putting them in parentheses after you’ve referenced the information. That’s not how journalists do it, yet they still make their sources clear.

If the article is online-only, sources are sometimes linked. For pieces like Tip, which appear both online and in print, sources are referenced in the reporting. For example, direct quotes, like “It’s critical to stop the bleeding,” from the shark piece, above, will have a “[name of person] says” somewhere in the sentence (“Waries says”). Paraphrases often start with a lead-in like, “According to …” or “Studies have found …” The Tip column quotes only one expert each week, so there is no need to keep adding “According to,” but, to continue our shark theme, notice the ways this paragraph from an Aug. 2019 article, “How Sharks Glow to Each Other Deep in the Ocean,” acknowledges its source:

In a study published Thursday in iScience, researchers reveal the secret behind this magical transformation: Molecules inside their scales transform how shark skin interacts with light, bringing in blue photons, and sending out green. This improved understanding of these sharks’ luminous illusions may lead to improvements in scientific imaging, as the study of biofluorescence in other marine life already has.

How does the first sentence make clear that the information comes from a particular study? How does the use of a colon help?

Now Try This: Make a List of Reliable Sources

Video

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transcript

Massive Shark Spotted in Cape Cod

Great white sharks have become increasingly prevalent along the beaches in Cape Cod in Massachusetts. Last year was the state’s first fatal shark attack since 1936.

“Whoa. No way. Oh my God.” “Hold on, you guys. Hold on.” “Holy [expletive].” “It just hit the boat.” “Oh my God.” “Oh my God.” “Wow.” “Left, left.” “Dad, come look at it. Dad, come, come over here. Dad.”

We started with sharks, and we’re ending with sharks.

Let’s pretend that you’re a journalist, it’s summer, and there have been a rash of shark attacks in the United States and around the world. Your editor gives you not just the 400 words Malia Wollan got to write about how to survive a shark attack, but, instead, 1,200, three times that number. She assigns you to investigate the question: Should swimmers worry about sharks?

How will you find out? Whom will you interview? What information will you be looking for? What individuals, institutions and organizations might be reliable experts or stakeholders on this question? How will you know they’re reliable? What kinds of studies and statistics might you need, and how will you know those are reliable?

Make as long of a list as you can of all the people and places you might consult to get a full answer to that question, then share your list with others.

Then take a look at a 2015 Times piece in which the reporter Christine Hauser answers the very question we posed above: Should swimmers worry about sharks? What experts and organizations does she seem to have consulted? How many of them are similar to what you put on your list? Are there any she’s missing that she might have included if she had another 1,000 words to work with? How did she work the information in, both via direct quotes and paraphrases?

Finally, now that you’ve gone through all the exercises in this lesson, your next assignment is, of course, to figure out who and what expert sources to consult to find a range of information about whatever you’re writing about — then borrow some of the “writer’s moves” above to weave that information into your essay as seamlessly as you can. Good luck!

Related Questions for Any Informational Piece That Quotes Experts

• Look through the piece. How many sources, whether they’re people or institutions, are named? How many are quoted, and how many are cited as the source of paraphrased information? How are they cited? What do those sources add to the piece?

• Why do you think the author chose these sources? How reliable do they seem? How do you know?

• How is the information from experts woven into the piece? How are quotes introduced? How do paraphrases make the source of the information clear?

• What points of view, if any, are missing? What experts or stakeholders could this person have interviewed to get those points of view? Why?

• What else do you notice or admire about this piece? What lessons might it have for your writing?