Citation Integration as A Fault Line in Academic Writing: The Stylistics of Student Essays

In this paper, I study citation integration in a small corpus of undergraduate essays written in English in an English Department in France. With the concept of the ‘quotation sandwich’ in mind, I study the various parts of nearly 250 examples. Roughly half the examples seem error-free, while the other half have problems in nearly equal proportions in their claims, reporting clauses and quotations, or follow-up comments. I discuss some possible causes of the errors, as well as some new ideas for research in stylistics.