Direct quotations of a person’s words, whether spoken or written, must be in quotation marks.
“Twitter,” according to social media researcher Jameson Brown, “is the best social network for brand to customer engagement.”
In dialogue, begin a new paragraph to mark a change in speaker.
“Mom, his name is Willie, not William. A thousand times I’ve told you, it’s Willie.”
“Willie is a derivative of William, Lester. Surely his birth certificate doesn’t have Willie on it, and I like calling people by their proper names.”
“Yes, it does, ma’am. My mother named me Willie K. Mason.”
—Gloria Naylor
If a single speaker utters more than one paragraph, introduce each paragraph with a quotation mark, but do not use a closing quotation mark until the end of the speech.
Exception: indirect quotations
Do not use quotation marks around indirect quotations. An indirect quotation reports someone’s ideas without using that person’s exact words. In academic writing, indirect quotation is called paraphrase or summary. (See R2-c.)
Social media researcher Jameson Brown finds Twitter the best social media tool for companies that want to reach their consumers.
Exception: long quotations
Long quotations of prose or poetry are generally set off from the text by indenting. Quotation marks are not used because the indented format tells readers that the quotation is taken word-for-word from the source.
After making an exhaustive study of the historical record, James Horan evaluates Billy the Kid like this:
The portrait that emerges of [the Kid] from the thousands of pages of affidavits, reports, trial transcripts, his letters, and his testimony is neither the mythical Robin Hood nor the stereotyped adenoidal moron and pathological killer. Rather Billy appears as a disturbed, lonely young man, honest, loyal to his friends, dedicated to his beliefs, and betrayed by our institutions and the corrupt, ambitious, and compromising politicians in his time. (158)
The number in parentheses is a citation handled according to MLA style (see MLA-4a).
MLA, APA, and CMS have specific guidelines for what constitutes a long quotation and how it should be indented (see MLA-3a, APA-3a, and CMS-3a, respectively).