| Direct Quotations | Quotations of Poetry |
| Indirect Quotations | Dialogue |
| Quotations within Quotations | Titles |
| Omitting Words from Quotations | Words |
| Long Quotations | Quotation Marks and Other Punctuation |
Examples:
Example:
According to their statement to the local papers,
the Allens refuse to use pesticide because of potential water pollution.
Example:
The agricultural reporter for the newspaper explained,
"When I talked to the Allens last week, they said, 'We refuse to use
that pesticide.' "
If you leave words out of a quotation, use an ellipsis
mark to indicate the omitted words. If you need to insert something within
a quotation, use a pair of brackets to enclose the addition.
Examples:
For quotations that extend more than four typed or handwritten lines on a page, set the quotation off by indenting ten spaces from the left margin and
double-space the quotation. Do not use quotation marks for this indented material.
Example:
Short Quotations
When you quote a single line of poetry, write it like any other short quotation.
Two lines can be run into your text with a slash mark to indicate the end of the first line.
Use quotation marks.
Example:
In his poem "Mending Wall," Robert Frost
says: "Something there is that doesn't love a wall,/That sends the
frozen-ground-swell under it."
Long Quotations
If the quotation is three lines or longer, set it off like a longer quotation. (Some people prefer to set off two-line quotations also, for emphasis.)
Quote the poem line by line as it appears on the original page, and do not use quotation marks.
Indent ten spaces from the left margin.
Example:
In his poem "Mending Wall," Robert Frost questions the building
of barriers and walls:
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out
And to whom I was like to give offense.
Write each person's speech, however short, as separate paragraphs.
Use commas to set off phrases such as he said.
Closely related bits of narrative can be included in the paragraph.
Example
"Alas!" said the old woman, "I have a shrewd suspicion of a reverend Grey Friar, who stayed in the same inn with us at Badajos. God preserve me from judging rashly, but he came into our room twice, and he set out upon his journey long before us." "Alas!" said Candide, "dear Pangloss has often demonstrated to me that the goods of this world are common to all men, and that each has an equal right to them. But according to these principles the Grey Friar ought to have left us enough to carry us through our journey. Have you nothing at all left, my dear Cunegonde?" "Not a farthing," said she. "What then must we do?" said Candide. Voltaire. Candide. (1759). Ed. Stanley Appelbaum. New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1991. 22.
If one person's speech goes on for several paragraphs,
use quotation marks at the beginning of each paragraph but not at the end
of the paragraphs. To signal the end of the person's speech, use quotation
marks at the end of the last paragraph.
Use quotation marks for:
When you introduce quotations, use the comma to set off less formal expressions such as "he said," "she asked," or "Brady stated."
Use the colon to introduce formal quotations and
quotations that have two or more sentences.
Examples:
- As D. H. Nachas explains, "The gesture of greeting others differs greatly from one culture to another."
- D. H. Nachas explains cultural differences in greeting others: "Touching is not a universal sign of greeting. While members of European cultures meet and shake hands as a gesture of greeting, members of Asian cultures bow to indicate respect. "
Put commas and periods before the second quotation mark at the close of
the quotation, except when a reference follows the quotation.
Examples:
Put colons and semicolons after the second quotation mark at the close of the quotation.
Example:
Williams described the experiment as "a definitive step forward"; other scientists disagreed.
Put the dash, question mark, and exclamation point
before the second set of quotation marks when the dash, question
mark, or exclamation
point apply to the quotation
Example:
He asked, "Do you need this book?"
Put the dash, question mark, and exclamation point
after the second set of quotation marks when one of these punctuation
marks applies to the whole
sentence.
Example:
Does Ms. Gulbrandsen always say to her students, "You must work harder"?
Do not put quotation marks around the titles of
your essays.
Do not use quotation marks for common nicknames, bits of humor, technical
terms that readers are likely to know, and trite or well-known expressions.
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