Epicrisis
Quoting a passage and then commenting on it in your own voice.
Epicrisis is the figure in which a speaker cites a passage — a line of scripture, a law, a proverb, an opponent's sentence — and then immediately judges or interprets it. The quotation supplies the authority; the comment supplies the direction.
It is the basic structural move of the sermon, the legal brief and the literary essay, which is why so much quotation practice descends from it. Ancient rhetoricians treated it as a figure precisely because the pairing does persuasive work that neither element does alone.
The craft lies in the ratio. A quotation longer than the comment on it turns the writer into a compiler; a comment that merely restates the quotation wastes the reader's attention. The comment should say something the quoted words do not.
Common mistake: letting the comment quietly change the quotation's meaning. If your gloss depends on a sense the original passage does not support, a reader who checks the source will discount everything around it.
“Bacon writes that "reading maketh a full man". Full, note — not accurate, not wise. He is describing capacity, and the rest of the sentence supplies the discipline that shapes it.”
Keep reading the glossary
The disciplined interpretation of a text — drawing meaning out of it rather than reading meaning in.
The introductory clause — 'as Orwell writes' — that flags a quotation and identifies its source in running prose.
A short anecdote or saying attributed to a named figure — a classical rhetorical unit for teaching, arguing, and remembering.
An explicit definition, mid-argument, of a term the speaker will then rely on — narrowing the sense to prevent ambiguity.