Punctuation

Using quotation marks to signal direct quotations

Page contents:

Longer passages
Poetry
Dialogue

Use double quotation marks to signal a direct quotation.

The president asked Congress to “try common sense. “

She smiled and said, “Son, this is one incident I will never forget. “

Single quotation marks enclose a quotation within a quotation. Open and close the quoted passage with double quotation marks, and change any quotation marks that appear within the quotation to single quotation marks.

James Baldwin says, “The title ‘The Uses of the Blues’ does not refer to music; I don’t know anything about music.”

Longer passages

If the prose passage you wish to quote exceeds four typed lines, set it off from the rest of the text by starting it on a new line and indenting it one inch from the left margin. This format, known as block quotation, does not require quotation marks.

In Winged Words: American Indian Writers Speak, Leslie Marmon Silko describes her early education:

I learned to love reading, and love books, and the printed page, and therefore was motivated to learn to write. The best thing . . . you can have in life is to have someone tell you a story . . . but in lieu of that . . . I learned at an early age to find comfort in a book, that a book would talk to me when no one else would. (145)

This block quotation, including the ellipses and the page number in parentheses at the end, follows the style of the Modern Language Association (MLA). Other organizations, such as the American Psychological Association (APA) and the University of Chicago Press, have different guidelines for ellipses and block quotations.

Poetry

If the quotation is fewer than four lines, include it within your text, enclosed in double quotation marks. Separate the lines of the poem with slashes, each preceded and followed by a space, to tell the reader where one line of the poem ends and the next begins.

In one of his best-known poems, Robert Frost remarks, “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—/ I took the one less traveled by, / And that has made all the difference” (lines 18-20).

To quote four or more lines of poetry, indent the block one inch from the left margin, and do not use quotation marks.

The duke in Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess” is clearly a jealous, vain person, whose own words illustrate his arrogance:

She thanked men—good! but thanked

Somehow—I know not how—as if she ranked

My gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name

With anybody’s gift. (lines 31 – 34)

When you quote poetry, take care to follow the indention, spacing, capitalization, punctuation, and other features of the original poem.

Dialogue

When you write dialogue or quote a conversation, enclose the words of each speaker in quotation marks, and mark each shift in speaker by beginning a new paragraph.

“I want no proof of their affection,” said Elinor, “but of their engagement I do.”

“I am perfectly satisfied of both.”

“Yet not a syllable has been said to you on the subject, by either of them.”

—JANE AUSTEN, Sense and Sensibility

Because of the paragraph breaks in this example, we know when Elinor is speaking and when her mother is speaking without the author’s having to repeat said Elinor, her mother said, and so on.

For Multilingual Writers: Quoting in American English

For Multilingual Writers: Quotation marks

Quick Help: Editing for quotation marks