In many cases, a relevant piece of evidence may be found in the midst of a conversation between two or more characters, or the quotation may be interrupted by narrative. In these cases, we need to either work on shifting some of the job from the quotation to the quote weaving, or we need to edit the quotation a bit.
Let's keep working with To Kill a Mockingbird. The passage below appears early in the novel, after Scout has had a very bad first day of school. She talks over her day with Atticus, and he gives her this very important piece of advice:
“First of all,” he said, “if you can learn a simple trick, Scout, you’ll get along a lot better with all kinds of folks. You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view—”
“Sir?”
“—-until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”
In this passage, most of the words are spoken by Atticus, but there are a few words from Scout as a narrator, and one from Scout as a character. The problem here is that we can't really put together a piece of dialog phrasing for our quote weaving that would cover all three of those sources, so we need to work on reducing the number of sources to one.
First, let's work on eliminating the other character from the conversation. We can do that by editing the quotation slightly, and then making sure that we work on the quote weaving a bit. To edit the quotation, we can uses an ellipsis (or a "dot dot dot"). Including an ellipsis says to the reader that "there are more words here, but I'm skipping them over."
Here's how it would look if we use an ellipsis to skip the words from Scout the character:
Step 1: “First of all,” he said, “if you can learn a simple trick, Scout, you’ll get along a lot better with all kinds of folks. You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view—”
“[…]”
“—until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”
Step 2: “First of all,” he said, “if you can learn a simple trick, Scout, you’ll get along a lot better with all kinds of folks. You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view—” “[…]” “-until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”
Step 3: “First of all,” he said, “if you can learn a simple trick, Scout, you’ll get along a lot better with all kinds of folks. You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view […] until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”
Notice that in step 3, quite a bit of punctuation was deleted. Not only were quotations deleted (since we no longer need to indicate dialogue from Scout), but we also deleted the dashes on either side of the interruption. Ellipses can work as something of a catch-all piece of punctuation. Any kind of punctuation you might need in or around the ellipses can be implied by the ellipsis itself, so there is no need to include any commas or periods around an ellipsis.
We can continue with the same trick to remove Scout's narration. We'll just replace her narration, and the surrounding punctuation, with an ellipsis. Like this:
“First of all […] if you can learn a simple trick, Scout, you’ll get along a lot better with all kinds of folks. You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view […] until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”
Finally, we have a set of words, 100% of which are said by just one character. Now we can build some quote weaving for this quotation, so it would look like this:
After Scout's difficult first day of school, she complains to Atticus that she was treated unfairly; Atticus encourages her to think about things from the perspectives of others, saying, “First of all […] if you can learn a simple trick, Scout, you’ll get along a lot better with all kinds of folks. You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view […] until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”
Sometimes, the evidence you want to use might be found in the midst of a conversation between two or more characters. In this case, the best choice is to review the conversation and find the most important or relevant point, quote only that part of the quotation, and summarize the rest of the conversation in your quote weaving.
Let's take another look at To Kill a Mockingbird. This conversation occurs when Atticus arrives in his home to inform Scout, Alexandra, Maudie, and Calpurnia that Tom Robinson has been shot to death by prison guards:
“Tom’s dead.”
Aunt Alexandra put her hands to her mouth.
“They shot him,” said Atticus. “He was running. It was during their exercise period. They said he just broke into a blind raving charge at the fence and started climbing over. Right in front of them—”
“Didn’t they try to stop him? Didn’t they give him any warning?” Aunt Alexandra’s voice shook.
“Oh yes, the guards called to him to stop. They fired a few shots in the air, then to kill. They got him just as he went over the fence. They said if he’d had two good arms he’d have made it, he was moving that fast. Seventeen bullet holes in him. They didn’t have to shoot him that much. Cal, I want you to come out with me and help me tell Helen.”
“Yes sir,” she murmured, fumbling at her apron. Miss Maudie went to Calpurnia and untied it.
“This is the last straw, Atticus,” Aunt Alexandra said.
“Depends on how you look at it,” he said. “What was one Negro, more or less, among two hundred of ‘em? He wasn’t Tom to them, he was an escaping prisoner.” Atticus leaned against the refrigerator, pushed up his glasses, and rubbed his eyes. “We had such a good chance,” he said. “I told him what I thought, but I couldn’t in truth say that we had more than a good chance. I guess Tom was tired of white men’s chances and preferred to take his own. Ready, Cal?”
In this conversation, there are a few things going on:
Atticus informs the others of Tom's death
When asked, he clarifies that Tom had been warned repeatedly
He asks Calpurnia to help him break the news to Tom's wife, Helen
He responds to Alexandra's concern that the situation has gotten significantly more dangerous
The next step would involve deciding who says the most important thing to support your argument. This will depend on the focus of your paragraph. For the purposes of this example, let's say the focus rests on the inhumanity shown to the Black community in Maycomb. In that case, the last section, said by Atticus, matters most, but the other points in the conversation matter too, just to a lesser extent.
We can avoid quoting the other lines from Atticus, Alexandra, and Calpurnia by mentioning the relevant parts of the conversation in the context we write for quote weaving. The end result might look something like this:
When Atticus interrupts Alexandra's missionary circle, he privately informs Alexandra, Maudie, Scout, and Calpurnia that Tom Robinson has been shot to death by prison guards as he tried to escape, despite being warned repeatedly. When Alexandra expresses her concern that the situation in Maycomb has become more dangerous, Atticus responds, saying, "Depends on how you look at it […] What was one Negro, more or less, among two hundred of ‘em? He wasn’t Tom to them, he was an escaping prisoner […] I guess Tom was tired of white men’s chances and preferred to take his own."
You may also notice how ellipses are used in the above quotation. The first ellipsis is used to cut out Scout's narration, so the quote weaving is accurate when it claims that all the words in the quotation are said by Atticus. The second ellipsis does this as well, but it also edits out some of Atticus' reflection on the situation. This shortens the quotation, and helps it focus on the ideas that are most relevant to the paragraph's topic.