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Writers often need to frame carefully-selected quotations with indirect summaries or paraphrases to emphasize their own point.
In the following passage, the author quotes from a letter that the fifteen-year-old Marie Antoinette received from her mother:
[quote]
“It’s not your beauty, which frankly is not very great,” wrote the mother to the daughter. “Nor your talents nor your brilliance (you know perfectly well that you have neither).” It was solely her good nature and her pretty ways, so well deployed, that had enabled Marie Antoinette to please. Without these, she was nothing.
Antonia Fraser, Marie Antoinette: The Journey
[end quote]
Fraser follows the direct quotation with what appears to be an indirect quotation, or a paraphrase, of the mother’s analysis. Fraser could have quoted from the entire letter, but a long quotation would have tired her readers. Now, we quickly get the point that Marie Antoinette’s mother was cruelly critical, if perceptive, of her daughter’s social skills.
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