Dr. Bordelon's Graphic Novel Course

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Verb List 

Two items on this page: a list of verbs to incorporate into sentences with quotes and a list of sentences including sources.

Use both as tools to help you work quotes into your own prose.

Use a verb from the following list when introducing outside sources and then commenting on them. It can also come in handy when providing context for quotes from the work your writing about.

add
agree analyze answer argue

believe charge
claim comment conclude consider

criticize declare describe define discover emphasize

explain
feels illustrate imply indicate
list

maintain mention |note observe object
offer

point out reinforce report
reply respond reveal

show
stress suggest support think
write

What follows are a series of sentences which successfully incorporate quotes from poems. Below that are sentences which incorporate quotes from an outside source.

Review these to get a sense of the rhythm and cadence involved in setting up a quote and how the verb list above can help "launch" a quote.

The violence in Destiny is even seen in arm movements. On several pages, men have their arms upraised about to strike the main character.  Even the main character refects this imagery: she is depicted with a hatchet in her hand about to kill the salesmen who lured her away from the Taylor.

Spiegelman's images of suprise include facial expressions.  When Vladek is shot at while urinating at night when first captured, his eyes are sketched in a bullseye of suprise.

The family frustration and nervousness of life under Nazi occupation is seen when Vladek's mother shouts "ENOUGH!" to his father as he recounts how he was treated.


From the beginning of the text, Bradford sets the Puritans apart from others. He writes that "many became enlightened by the Word of God and had their ignorance and sins discovered" (157). Separating the "enlightened" from what seems to be the unenlightened makes a clear "us v. them" distinction.

The power of O'Connor's "The Revelation" is derived from its moral tenacity. As the writer Joyce Carol Oates observes, the story "questions the very foundations of our assumptions of the ethical life" (52). Since Mrs. Turpin's "foundation" was based upon a shallow and limited view of religion, she was ripe for a fall.

Although some critics argue that surrealism began in 1924 after the publication of the Surrealist Manifesto by Andre Breton (Kershner 52), Kafka's work, published a decade earlier, shares many qualities of surrealist art, and should be considered a precursor to the later movement.

The critics David Boxer and Cassandra Phillips also note Carver's seeming lack of style. They write that "what seems to be casual talk, virtually empty of communication, is really very deliberately and finely wrought" (99). This emphasis on the craft of his fiction -- it is "deliberately and finely wrought" -- underscores the nature of Carver's oxymoronic talent: he made conversation seem so natural that it seems to merely record what is being said.

As Dickens wrote in an essay published in the same decade as Hard Times, "It is probable that nothing will ever root out from among the common people an innate love they have for dramatic entertainment in some form or other" (305-306). That Lousia and Tom, members of the upper-class, would also find amusement in the circus shows that the differences between classes -- between people -- is not as well defined as we would think.

F. R. Leavis argues that the circus performers are symbols of "human spontaneity" (344). As such, they operate according to emotions rather than from the slow and measured intellect of Gradgrind.

Mitchell Domhnal notes that "some critics allege that to read Dickinson in any standard typographic edition is effectively to read her in translation." This suggests that the usual method of reading a poem in a textbook isn't the best way to read Dickinson .

Leypoldt Gunter argues that there are "two types of Carver stor[ies]," with one being realistic and the other more experimental (320).



© David Bordelon 2016