Integrate quotations into your text

"Weaving" by Basuki Abdullah

Compare:

DRAFT:
Emerson spends the entire time focused on how we should get to know ourselves, "These are the voices which we hear in solitude, but they grow faint and inaudible as we enter into the world" (238), when we are around other energies and minds it can sometimes cloud our perception.

COMMENTARY:

The sentence above includes three independent clauses. The first starts with "Emerson;" the second is the quotation; the third starts with "when." Because commas separate them, it is a comma splice. Avoid those and look for a way to clarify who the speaker of the quotation is.

REVISED:

Emerson spends the entire time focused on how we should get to know ourselves. He claims that when we are around other energies and minds, it can sometimes cloud perceptions that might come to us more easily if we were alone. As he puts it, wisdom comes from "the voices which we hear in solitude, but they grow faint and inaudible as we enter into the world" (238).