Quoting Sources

A Quotation of Four or More Typewritten Lines

Quotations of four or more typewritten lines should be set off from your text in single spacing and indented in their entirety, generally 5 or 10 spaces from the left margin (using the tab key), with no quotation marks at beginning or end. (See the extended quotation in What Must Be Documented.) Rules about how many spaces to indent and about whether to single- or double-space extended quotations vary with different documentation systems; check the guidelines for the particular system you're using.

A Quotation of Up to Three Lines of Poetry (as in Shakespeare)

Quotations of up to three lines of poetry should be integrated into your sentence. For example: In Julius Caesar, Antony begins his famous speech with "Friends, Romans, Countrymen, lend me your ears; / I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him" (III.ii.75-76). Notice that a slash (/) with a space on either side is used to separate lines.

A Quotation of More than Three Lines of Poetry (also in the case of Shakespeare)

More than three lines of poetry should be indented. As with any extended (indented) quotation, do not use quotation marks unless you need to indicate a quotation within your quotation. The quotation is presented as it is in the text. The entire quotation is then offset from the left margin using a single tab (use the tab rather than the space bar!)

Quoting Only a Portion of the Whole

Use an ellipsis (. . .) only when it is not obvious that you are quoting only a portion of the whole.

To Add Your Own Clarification, Comment, or Correction

Within quotations, use square brackets [ ] (not parentheses) to add your own clarification, comment, or correction. For example, the material enclosed in square brackets in the following sentence was added to clarify the quotation: "He [Hamlet] changes significantly after seeing Fortinbras and his army." Use [sic], which is Latin for "in this manner," to indicate that a mistake or problem of some sort is in the original material you are quoting and is not a mistake you introduced in your transcription.

General Punctuation of Quotations

Place commas and period inside the closing quotation marks, but all other punctuation marks--such as semicolons, colons, exclamation points and question marks--go outside the closing quotation marks except when they are part of the quoted material.