How you capture source material — in your words or in a short or long quotation — affects how you credit it. Always set off the source’s words using quotation marks or the indented form for a long “block” quotation.

If material, quoted or not, comes from a specific place in a source, add a page number or other location, such as the section number supplied in an electronic source or the chapter or line in a literary work. No page number is needed for general material (an overall theme or concept) or a source without page numbers (a Web site, film, recording, performance).

Overall Summary or Important Idea

Terrill’s Malcolm X: Inventing Radical Judgment takes a fresh look at the rhetorical power and strategies of Malcolm X’s speeches.

Specific Summary or Paraphrase

One analysis of Malcolm X’s 1964 speech “The Ballot or the Bullet” concludes that it exhorts listeners to the radical action of changing vantage point (Terrill 129-31).

If you paraphrase or summarize a one-page article, no page number is needed because it will appear in your list of works cited.

Vacuum-tube audio equipment is making a comeback, with aficionados praising the warmth and glow from the tubes, as well as the sound (Patton).

Blended Paraphrase and Quotation

When your words are blended with those of your source, clearly distinguish the two. Use quotation marks to set apart the words of your source.

To avoid generalizing about “people-with-dementia” (Pearce xxii), the author simply uses names.

Brief Quotation with Formal Launch Statement

Vecsey states his claim for baseball: “No other sport has this endurance” (6).

Brief Quotation Integrated in Sentence

“No other sport” (6), according to Vecsey’s Baseball: A History of America’s Favorite Game, requires players to tolerate double or triple headers.

Double and triple headers require more stamina than any “other sport” (Vecsey 6).

Only baseball, according to Vecsey, “has this endurance” (6).

Long Quotation

When a quotation is longer than four typed lines, double-space and indent the entire quotation one inch instead of using quotation marks. If it is one paragraph or less, begin its first line without extra paragraph indentation. Use ellipsis marks (…) to show any omission from the middle.

Quotation from the Bible

Instead of the page, note the version, book, chapter, and verse numbers.

Once again, the author alludes to the same passage: “What He has seen and heard, of that He testifies” (New American Bible, John 3.32).

Quotation from a Novel or Short Story

First note the page number in your own copy. If possible, add the section or chapter where the passage could be found in any edition.

In A Tale of Two Cities, Dickens describes Stryver as “shouldering himself (morally and physically) into companies and conversations” (110; bk. 2, ch. 4).

Quotation from a Play

For a verse play, list the act, scene, and line numbers, divided by periods.

Love, Iago says, “is merely a lust of the blood and a permission of the will” (Oth. 1.3.326).

Quotation from a Poem

Add a slash to show where a new line begins. Use “line” or “lines” in the first reference but only numbers in subsequent references, as in these examples from William Wordsworth’s “The World Is Too Much with Us.” The first reference:

The next reference:

Separate part and line numbers by a period, without the word “line.”

In “Ode: Intimations of Immortality,” Wordsworth ponders the truths of human existence, “Which we are toiling all our lives to find, / In darkness lost, the darkness of the grave” (8.116-17).