Preparing for the stressbuster workshop called Graphic design is my passion! How to create irresistible content for social media to be held on December 11, 2 pm, I was going to post some images with inspirational quotes created with Canva. One day I received a photo that reminded me of the famous sketch from Winnie-the-Pooh: Pooh and Piglet walking away, a perfect background for an inspirational quote.
Which quote should I use from Winnie-the-Pooh?
If you Google Winnie-the-Pooh quotes, one of the most popular is
How do you spell love? (Piglet)
You don't spell love. You feel it.
(Winnie-the-Pooh)
Running an image search will result in images, posters, mugs, t-shirts, and more with this quote on them. Great, sounds like a popular one, perfect for my background image, one would think.
As a research librarian, I am expected to practice what I preach, so I wanted to find the page number and cite it from a legitimate edition, as we suggested. The book is available online from the HathiTrust emergency collection, so it would be a piece of cake to put a part of the dialog in quotes and locate the page number in the book. Or so I thought.
But it was not in there! Or in any other online texts that I was able to put my virtual hands on.
Long story short, I ended up on a site specifically set up to identify misquotes from Winnie-the-Pooh, only to find out that attributing quotes to books where they don’t belong seems to be quite a thing and Winnie-the-Pooh is one of the victims.
There are several great sites offering quotes from famous books. If you create an account on Goodreads, the world’s largest social media-type sites for readers, you will not only find personalized with book recommendations and community reviews, the availability of a book in the nearest library, but also a lot of quotes from a variety of titles in multiple languages.
There are many other popular resources on the Internet and social media that show up in a search for quotes, some requiring an account or residing behind a paywall, offering educational and informative content on books. Using one of our Tales We Read discussion stories, Flowers for Algernon as an example, I looked into a few of them, mostly on pages with study guides, geared toward students as research location for students of any age. Many of them also feature articles, essays, biographies, and study guides. One may be required to create an account to get behind the paywall for certain content.
- In one of the most citing-friendly sources called BookRags, the Algernon-quotes all came with page numbers, including the paragraphs on the page, however, I was not sure about the edition.
- Another type is Course Hero, a popular site with study resources and expert tutors in many disciplines. I liked how the page listing the quotes also provided a few sentences to explain the quote and a minimum source, such as which Progress Report, which made the quote easily discoverable in any edition.
- Another multi-tiered study resource site, Shmoop, provided a free version of several quotes, neatly organized under tags, with page numbers. This site allows students and educators to log in with their connected social media accounts for more content.
So, what did I do with my image? I have chosen another quote, one that can be from the book – or not. Find it, if you can!
“Cite Right” Series
- Part 1: Cite Right – Workshop in the Library
- Part 2: Cite Right – Confessions of an Edition Ignoramus
- Part 3: Cite Right – Phantom References
- Part 4: Cite Right – Resources from RUL
- Part 5: Cite Right – Misquotes
- Part 6: Cite Right – Images
- Part 7: Cite Right – Predators of Science
Brought to you by Books We Read at Chang.