Quote Explainer Tool

🖋 Quote Explanation Tool: Why Use It?

If you’re wondering how a quote explainer may come in handy during your writing work, we have a couple of good reasons for considering this analyzer’s use:

📎 Add a source to your text	You can quickly integrate a trusted source by quoting a famous person with relevant expertise in your academic area. This way, you will reveal a good understanding of your research topic and seminal research in the field.
📖 Conduct literary analysis	You can analyze a short literary piece or a fragment of it, making the text easier to understand and focusing on the literary devices used.
💬 Understand inspiring quotes	You can capture the meaning of famous inspiring quotes quickly, freeing yourself from hours of tedious research and interpretation.

🔰 How to Explain a Quote in 4 Steps

Using quotes in academic writing is a commonplace, unavoidable practice, as you need to rely on credible external sources to back up your arguments.

Here is an algorithm for using paraphrased quotes and their explanations in your papers to avoid plagiarism and raise your content’s authority.

Step 1 – Look at the Context

An intro to your interpretation process should be the study of background information about the author.

For instance:

Two similar quotes about Black people’s suffering will have absolutely different interpretations when voiced by Martin Luther King or a Ku Klux Klan member.

Thus:

Finding at least a bit of information about who the author is, when they lived, what position they occupied, what values and missions they fought for, and what their contribution was is a must for a relevant, data-backed quote analysis.

If you want to start your paper with a catchy hook, try our attention getter generator. All you’ll need to do is add a topic (in this case, it could be the quote you’re analyzing or a part of it) and choose a hook type.

Step 2 – Find the Keywords

Next, you should proceed to the quote’s actual interpretation. It’s vital to read it several times for a complete understanding of its meaning.

Then:

Look for the keywords that you consider the most significant in the quote’s text and write them down for initial analysis. Many famous people’s quotes are full of symbolism, literary devices, metaphors, and hidden meanings, so you should try to capture those items for in-depth review.

A good idea would be to use a text-to-speech tool that will help you catch the quote’s meaning better by listening to it.

Step 3 – Identify the Main Idea

The following step is more inductive in nature, as it helps you move from the particular to the general.

You already know:

• Who the author of your quote is;
• What place they occupied in their relevant academic, political, or artistic niche;
• What their mission and goals are.

You also have a list of meaningful keywords that build up the quote’s backbone and cause the strongest impact on the reader.

With these details in mind, you can now shape the quote’s main idea and message, talking about what the author really meant with those words:

1. Did they analyze a specific experience?
2. Did they give an evaluation of a person, event, or phenomenon?
3. Were they calling to a specific action among their audiences?
4. Did they try to evoke feelings and emotions in their readers and listeners?

All these considerations will help you arrive at the final analytical conclusion about the quote’s main idea, which should be of relevance to your academic work (otherwise, why include it?).

Step 4 – Revise

The final step in the analytical process is to return to your original quote after in-depth interpretation. Reread it to ensure that you’ve indeed grasped the gist correctly; compare your initial impressions with those you get after analysis. If you feel you’ve gone somewhat off-topic and deviated from the quote’s meaning in the analysis, adjust your conclusions to fit the quote’s content ideally.

📒 Quote Explanation Example

Let’s illustrate the process of interpretation of a famous quote from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein:

It is well. I go; but remember, I shall be with you on your wedding night.

We’ll go through the analysis step by step to show how it works in practice.

Step #1 - Context analysis	The quote has no negativity in it, but it’s enough to find out who said this and under which circumstances to feel the deadly menace. These are the words of the Monster, the creation of Victor Frankenstein, who felt miserable and abandoned throughout his short life and whose hatred culminated at Victor’s refusal.
Step #2 - Keywords	The quote is short, but the words that stand out are “go,” “remember,” “with you,” and “wedding night.” Even if the reader is clueless about the context, they may feel that a person saying those words is forced to leave and agrees to leave at that very moment but threatens to come back and spoil the person’s best day – their wedding night.
Step #3 - Main idea	As one can understand from the previous two steps, the quote is a menace – a note the leaving person gives to their offender and a promise to come back with revenge.
Step #4 - Revision	Once the interpretation details are made clear, we can return to the original quote. It reads well in line with the produced analysis, showing that an abandoned, offended Monster threatens to cause a tragedy on his creator’s wedding day.

Thank you for reading this article! If you want to paraphrase the analyzed quote, consider using our free text reworder. And don’t forget to scan the final version of your paper with an AI essay checker.

❓ Quote Explainer FAQ

Updated: Apr 9th, 2024

🔗 References

1. Quote Analysis—The Easy Way! | Student Learning Center
2. 5 Steps to Quote Analysis
3. 3 Ways to Analyze a Quote
4. Quotations - UNC Writing Center
5. Working with Quotations 3: Analysis