Your quote weaving and quotations allow your essay to make its point (and to convince your reader). Without evidence, your essay would just be a collection of wild, unsupported opinions. With evidence, your essay can become convincing and persuasive.
Your quotations do the work of convincing your reader that your view is the right one. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but the quotations in a story are the same for everyone. If you use those quotations to build a common understanding between you and your reader, then your essay can convince your reader to see the world in the same way that you do.
When gathering quotations, make sure you look for the effect that you're arguing, not the cause. For example, if we were writing a paragraph about patience (as seen in George from Of Mice and Men), we would need to look for moments where the claim we make in the topic sentence can be seen because of George's patience, instead of trying to prove that George is patient.
Here's a quote that might work: "He can talk if he wants to tell you anything" (Steinbeck 25). [TIP: Check out this page on citations if you need a review.]
Of course, if you haven't just read page 25 of Of Mice and Men recently, it might not be very clear how the above quotation proves anything about patience. That's where your quote weaving comes in.
Quote weaving has two jobs. Firstly, it creates context and understanding for a quotation, so your reader will be able to follow your point. Secondly, it provides a grammatical framework for the quotation, so that the sentence flows naturally and makes sense.
Most people do not have entire books or stories memorized perfectly, so if your essay quotes part of the text, it's important to remind the reader who is speaking, what is going on in that moment within the story, and whom they are speaking to. In other words, context in quote weaving is a brief description of what is happening at that moment in the story.
For the above quotation, George says those words to Curley towards the end of their first conversation, after Curley has already asked several prying questions, and made rude implications. To write context for this quotation, you might come up with something like:
When Curley meets George and Lennie for the first time, George responds to several rude and prying questions from Curley.
Quotations are a little bit unique in the world of writing. Quotations almost always need to be supported with a subject (the person or thing saying the words) and a verb (a word that describes the way the words are said or shared). This can be pretty simple in many cases. For the quotation above, you might only need something as simple as:
George says,
In this case, George is the subject (he is saying the words), and the verb ("says" to describe the way he's speaking;). Don't worry too much about using flavorful dialogue verbs, such as "yells," "retorts," or "questions." You can use "says" for anything said out loud by a character in the story, and your reader probably won't notice, but if you always use a flavorful dialogue verb, then that's all they'll notice. Think about these verbs like salt when seasoning a meal: using a little bit makes everything taste better, but using too much ruins the meal because the salt is all you'll taste.
NOTE: It's worth noticing that there is a comma at the end of the dialogue phrasing. That's because dialogue has some special rules, and one of them is that a comma should be included between the dialogue verb and the quotation. Most of the time, there shouldn't be a comma between a verb and the object of the verb, but dialogue phrasing is a unique case.
If we take the two parts of the quote weaving above, along with the quotation, and put them into one sentence, we'll get something like this:
When Curley meets George and Lennie for the first time, George responds to several rude and prying questions from Curley. George says, "He can talk if he wants to tell you anything" (Steinbeck 25).
This is an ok start, but we can make it a little better. First, we can combine this into one sentence by replacing the first period with a comma and a conjunction:
When Curley meets George and Lennie for the first time, George responds to several rude and prying questions from Curley, and George says, "He can talk if he wants to tell you anything" (Steinbeck 25).
Second, we can start building our case about patience a little early if we add an adverb to our dialogue phrase, so that we get the reader thinking about the idea of patience before we even start analyzing the quotation:
When Curley meets George and Lennie for the first time, George responds to several rude and prying questions from Curley, and George finally says, "He can talk if he wants to tell you anything" (Steinbeck 25).
This way, we have clearly and efficiently presented a moment from the story to the reader, so that we can convince them that we're right about our claims regarding patience. The reader will now understand what's going on in the story, who is speaking to whom, why, and (importantly) how.