When you are writing a literary criticism paper, you need to make sure that you provide some good quotations to support your arguments. This is actually one of the most important things that your teachers will be looking for most of the time. Over the years we have come across a lot of papers by students but most of the time we see students who try so hard but still fail to earn the marks that they want.
Before you start complaining about how terrible the teacher is or how the teacher has a personal vendetta against you, perhaps you need to look at the correct usage of quotations in your paper, and this might help you get some good vision as you proceed.
When you are working on your paper and you decide to use quotations, it is important for you to make sure that you do understand the role that they are supposed to play in your work. The quotations are basically supposed to support your paper, not act as the main agenda for your work.
One of the most common areas that students fail at is punctuation for the quotations. This is a very common problem, and most teacher will fail you because of the grammatical errors you make here. Simple mistakes like putting a quote outside a punctuation mark or inside when it is supposed to be outside will definitely lose you some marks.
You need to learn when to indent quotations and when not to. For example, if you happen to have quotations that are in prose and they are no more than four lines, you do not need to have them indented.
However, if the quotations are longer, you need to indent them. At the same time, you must also realize that quotations that have been indented do not require the use of quotation marks.
The ultimate goal of quotations in your work is to stress your ideas when you are working on the paper. You need to make sure that you include useful ideas that support your paper, and not ideas that will appear to stand as the main ideas in place of the major concept that you have been discussing.