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Quoting
Sometimes you will want to quote a source, either to preserve the author’s particularly well-expressed or emphatic phrasing or to lend authority to your discussion. Avoid quoting passages of more than two or three sentences, or your document will look like a mere compilation. Your job is to integrate an author’s words and ideas into your own thinking, not merely to introduce a series of quotations.
Read more about formatting quotations, see “Quotation Marks,” “Ellipses,” and “Square Brackets” in Appendix, Part C.
For a discussion of how to document quotations in Appendix, Part B.
Although you probably won’t be quoting long passages in your document, recording a complete quotation in your notes will help you recall its meaning and context more accurately when you are ready to integrate it into your own work.
The simplest form of quotation is an author’s exact statement:
As Jones states, “Solar energy won’t make much of a difference for at least a decade.”
To add an explanatory word or phrase to a quotation, use brackets:
As Nelson states, “It [the oil glut] will disappear before we understand it.”
Use ellipses (three spaced dots) to show that you are omitting part of an author’s statement:
| ORIGINAL STATEMENT | “The generator, which we purchased in May, has turned out to be one of our wisest investments.” |
| ELLIPTICAL QUOTATION | “The generator . . . has turned out to be one of our wisest investments.” |
According to the documentation style recommended by the Modern Language Association (MLA), if the author’s original statement has ellipses, you should add brackets around the ellipses that you introduce:
| ORIGINAL STATEMENT | “I think reuse adoption offers . . . the promise to improve business in a number of ways.” |
| ELLIPTICAL QUOTATION | “I think reuse adoption offers . . . the promise to improve business [. . .] .” |