HOW TO USE, PUNCTUATE AND DOCUMENT QUOTATIONS

in Dr. Lisa Berglund's classes

 

Paper format

 

All papers must be typed and double-spaced with one-inch margins on all four sides.  Please put your name, the name or number of the course, and the date in the upper right-hand corner.  Center your title four lines below (that is, two "returns" if you're double-spacing), and begin the paper's text two lines below the title.  It is helpful if the title appears in boldface.  Number the pages.

 

DOUBLE-SPACE EVERYTHING!!!  Do not add extra spaces before or after paragraphs or indented quotations and do not single-space indented quotations.

 

1. How to format quotations

 

If a quotation consists of one or two lines of verse or fewer than five lines of prose, do not indent it.  Just use quotation marks around the quoted material and indicate line breaks with slashes and capital letters.  See the first two examples below.

 

Longer quotations should be indented 10 spaces from the left margin. Do NOT indent from the right margin and DO NOT SINGLE-SPACE indented quotations! Do not skip extra lines before or after the indented quotation.  When you indent quoted material, do not add quotation marks as well.

 

If you are indenting, preserve the lines as they appear on the printed page; do not use backslashes to separate lines of poetry unless you are incorporating the quotation into your own sentence.   Never use backslashes in prose quotations.  Line breaks in prose are a function of typesetting, not a choice of the author, and therefore need not be preserved.

 

2. Citing lines or page numbers for quotations; punctuating quotations and citations

 

For a long poem, give the book, canto (if applicable) and lines:

 

            In the grammatical ambiguity of God's pronouncement, "This day I have begot  whom I

 

declare / My only Son" (5.603-4), Milton conflates the creation of the  Son with the

 

creation of time itself.

 

For a continuously numbered poem, just give the lines.

 

            We wonder whether lust or guile motivates Bercilak's lady when the poet tells us that the

 

lady  "pursuing ever the purpose that pricked her heart, / Was awake with the dawn"

 

(1733-35).

 

For plays, give the act, scene and lines in arabic numerals, separated by periods.  Do not include line breaks in prose quotations from plays.

 

            In his analogy of the egg-shell crown, the Fool tells King Lear, "When thou clov'st thy

 

            crown i' th' middle and gav'st away both parts, thou bor'st thine ass on thy back o'er the

 

            dirt." (1.4.164-166)

 

 

Provide page numbers when you are quoting fiction or non-fiction prose.

 

In Rasselas, Johnson, through Imlac, observes that the "business of the poet" is not to

 

"number the streaks of the tulip" (62).

 

Note that in the examples above, the citation reference appears in parentheses outside the quotation marks, and never includes words or abbreviations like "lines," "ll.," "page" or "p."

 

Note the different rules for final punctuation.  When a quotation is not a complete sentence, as in the Gawain example, the period is not part of the quotation and therefore goes outside the parenthesis, at the end of the sentence.  In the example from King Lear, the period is part of the quotation:  therefore, the period goes inside the quotation marks.

 

Place ? and ! according to context.  If your sentence, but not the quotation within it, is a question or an exclamation, put the final ? or ! outside the quotation marks.

 

Can we believe Gulliver when he says, "I was able in the compass of two years . . . to

 

remove that infernal habit of lying, shuffling, deceiving, and equivocating" (919-20)?

 

If the quotation, but not the sentence, is a question or exclamation, put the final ? or ! inside the quotation marks.

 

The very first line of Hamlet expresses the uncertainty of the hero's situation: "Who's

 

there?" (1.1.1)

 

3. How to remove material from quotations or insert material into quotations

 

Always use ellipses (three dots separated by spaces) when you remove words from the middle of a quotation, as in the Gulliver's Travels example.  Do not put ellipses at the beginning of quotations, even when you begin quoting in the middle of a sentence (see the Gawain example).  Use ellipses at the end of a quotation only if the reader needs to know that you stopped quoting in the middle of a sentence or passage.

 

In general, avoid removing words from a quotation.   Never remove words from a quotation when doing so will mislead your reader about the meaning or the context of the passage you are quoting.  You must include enough material to represent the text fairly, and no more material than you actually analyze. Your words, plus the words of the quotation, must equal a complete, normally punctuated sentence.

 

If you insert material into a quotation, enclose it within square brackets.  Never add more material than is required for clarity or for grammatical correctness.

 

In the final scene of The Man of Mode, Sir Fopling explains that he husbands his

 

"vigor" in order to "make [his] court to the whole sex in a ballet" (5.2.340-41).

 

4. How to refer to titles and authors of the texts you are quoting

 

The titles of long works (novels, plays, films, long poems) and composite works (newspapers, poetry collections) are italicized or underlined; the titles of short works (lyric poems, essays, songs, short stories) appear in quotation marks.  For example, Singin' in the Rain is a film; "Singin' in the Rain" is a song.

 

If the source is clear from context, do not refer to the title in your citation (e.g., in the Hamlet example).  Otherwise, if you quote more than one text, put a short reference to the title before each page or line number.  For literary works, use initials or a word from the title (e.g., PL for Paradise Lost, Shrew for The Taming of the Shrew). In the following example, the quotations are taken from The Rape of the Lock and "Windsor Forest."  Note that abbreviation format follows title format: the abbreviation for The Rape of the Lock is italicized and that for "Windsor Forest" is not.

                       

            Pope decorates his world with products of British imperialism, including "glitt'ring

 

 Spoil" plundered from India and Arabia (RL 133-36) and "roofs of Gold" that crown

 

a commercial age of brass (WF 412).

 

If you are quoting criticism, use the authors' surnames before the page references, unless you mention the name in the text itself.  Do not use commas in citations.

 

Critics tend to agree that Maud's versification does not violate its drama; instead, the

 

variations in rhyme and meter "mirror the unstable fluctuations of the speaker's mind"

 

(Shaw 173); the shifts in form "suggest the beginnings of the speaker's escape from

 

neurotic introspection" (Stokes 101-102); even T.S. Eliot concedes that Tennyson

 

"exquisitely adapted the metre to the mood" (290).

 

5. Endnotes and Bibliographies

 

If you use secondary material, include a Works Cited page that lists references in MLA bibliographical format.  You need not prepare a Works Cited page if you quote only from texts assigned in this class.

 

Use endnotes or footnotes with superscript numbers only if you are adding important material that cannot appear in your text.  Notes should not be used simply for line or page references—these should appear parenthetically in the text.

 

The MLA [Modern Language Association] Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, Theses and Dissertations is the standard reference for citation and documentation rules in this class.  Where the MLA Handbook disagrees with this sheet, however, follow the sheet.