First, when quotations are integrated into your writing, the words from the source and your own words should meld smoothly to make a grammatical sentence. Take the following sentence as an example:

The third kind [of symbols] are “literary” and are “sometimes built upon natural or conventional symbols, adding meanings appropriate primarily with the work at hand,” and like the symbols with invested meaning which Harmon identifies, these symbols may sometimes“create meanings within a work for things that have no natural or conventional meaning outside it” (Frye, Baker, and Perkins 453).

Compare this sentence to the text from which the quotations were taken:

Literary symbols sometimes build upon natural or conventional symbols, adding meanings appropriate primarily within the work at hand, but sometimes they also create meanings within a work for things that have no natural or conventional meaning outside it, as Melville does with his white whale, for instance.

I have quoted most of this short paragraph, but I integrated its words with my own so that together they form a new compound sentence with inserted phrases that make a comparison between Frye's idea of how a literary symbol functions with what Harmon says about invested symbols.

Ordinarily a person who listens to your work being read aloud should not be able to tell which words are yours and which are quoted, except in two cases: the use of tag phrases such as "According to one source" or "Some critics say" that signal the introduction of ideas from your reading, and the presence of technical terms and jargon that often permeate the writing of academic professionals.

In working with source materials, you should avoid stacking up your references like blocks in a wall. Integrate them. It is sometimes hard to avoid leaning heavily on one source when it gives pertinent and valuable information, but there are ways to mitigate this problem.

Organize your work according to different topics and choose the information from each source that is relevant to each topic. Search all of your sources for facts, opinions, or examples that you can compare or contrast with information from the others. Using this approach, you do not make a block of references to one source, and then a block of references to a second, and so on. Instead, you have a variegated fabric of ideas with the intermixed sources serving as the warp (vertical) threads, and your comments like the woof (horizontal) threads tieing the information together.

Organizing an essay by topics is made easier when your sources provide the topics. This is the case with the essay on symbols. The essay opens with general comments about symbols and their function in literature, and then in paragraph three, a definition is given from Barton and Hudson. So, if we made an outline of the essay, the definition from Barton and Hudson would be roman numeral "I."

The next paragraph introduces the topic of the different kinds of symbols and quotes from Frye et al. This is a topic Barton and Hudson do not deal with. It would be roman numeral "II." But Barton and Hudson do talk about the two important attributes of symbols: their multivalent nature and their sometimes deliberate indeterminacy. This would be roman numeral "III." So, thus far, the organization of the essay on symbols has been dictated by the topics that the sources talk about, and it is easy enough to arrange these topics in a logical order.

The next topic is the difference between symbols, images, metaphors, and allegory and comes from Harmon. This would be roman numeral "IV" in the outline. However, Shakespeare's poem, "Winter," taken from Perrine is used to illustrate the characteristics of imagery, and Barton and Hudson are the source for the definition of allegory. Finally, Frye et al. are used to point out the relationship between allegory and personification.

So, arranging the topics that each source emphasises in a logical order provides an outline for the essay, and using information pertinent to each topic in the discussion helps to create a variegated fabric of sources and to avoid the blocks of references to particular sources.

To be revised and continued.