When you use evidence from a book or journal to support your arguments in your papers, you want to add the quote, summary or paraphrase into your writing in a way that seems smooth and natural. In order to use evidence effectively, you need to integrate it smoothly into your essay by following this pattern:
- State your claim.
- Give your evidence, remember to relate it to the claim.
- Comment on the evidence to show how it supports the claim.
Why worry about integrating evidence into your paper?
Properly integrating evidence is important because:
- Readers can better understand the relevance of smoothly integrated quotations.
- Readers can clearly see the connection between an integrated quotation and what it is trying to prove or illustrate.
- Readers can be better convinced by evidence presented in smoothly integrated quotations.
- Readers don’t experience being lost or frustrated by quotations that appear unrelated, inappropriate, or off topic.
