A Quote About Quotes Makes My Heart Sing (Even Though I Cannot Do It, Myself)

What if I just want to share something I like, without having a whole lot to say about it? I'll start by confessing to you that usually I skip over the long quotations I find on other people's blogs, and by so doing I probably miss out on some good stuff. But I won't fault you if you skip over mine, at least not this week.

I found this while wandering around in Robert Scholes's book The Rise and Fall of English:

My title, "So Happy a Skill," is a borrowed expression, a quotation. And that is appropriate, for I mean to take up the topic of how texts are made out of other texts.... (89)

The moment? The presenting of a paper on teaching writing in the University classroom. While I haven't recently gone through the entire essay to make sure I understand the details of Scholes's argument (or matter for that matter), I can tell you that he starts by speaking about the necessary intertextuality of academic writing, citing an example of intertextuality in a book from a different discipline, Michael Baxandall's Patterns of Intention, on the "interpretation of artworks." But here's the part I want to share this morning:

Part of what interested me in Baxandall's book was the fact that he used the model of a utilitarian work with some aesthetic dimension--the building of a bridge--as a way of getting a clearer look at the production of more fully aesthetic visual texts. It was this way of connecting the practical and the aesthetic, I now understand, that made Baxandall's book memorable for me, because it was connected by analogy to problems of reading and writing that I regularly face as a writer and a teacher. For my citation of Baxandall to be justified in the present circumstance, however, I shall have to work with it, do something with it to make it productive in terms of my particular brief on this occasion. I will go further and say that if I couldn't find anything to do with it other than cite or mention it, that it would be an error to bring it into my text. We academic writers must learn both that we have no choice but to be intertextual and also that we are obliged to add our own labor to these intertexts in order to make them do productive work in helping us with our own textual problems. We need them. We cannot do without them. But we must use them, work them, in order to get beyond mere quotation. In the case of my use of some words of Baxandall's, my effort takes the form of adapting his terminology to my rather different context. Often, in academic writing, borrowings from a field just beyond our own are most productive, precisely because they must be adapted and cannot simply be taken over unchanged. (91-92)

Quotation can be a thorny problem in the non-academic context as well, and though I have sometimes noted the poor use of quotation in texts I have read, I have failed to develop "so happy a skill" in the use of them myself. It's something I need to learn. Take for example this very same passage from Scholes. Ideally, I thought, I should have been able to condense the paragraph since you readers don't know about Baxendall, most probably don't care about Baxendall. Though I find Scholes's transparency about his writing process enchanting (I'm weird that way), the point for me in this paragraph was his commentary on the right way to use quotations in academic writing. It's true that this is what the entire paragraph is about, but not in a form that I could use for my own project.  I tried at one point to use ellipses to shorten it. I tried using brackets to fill in the necessary details. My conclusion is that developing the skill is going to require some dedicated practice.