Quotations

QUOTATIONS

Note the following requirements regarding the inclusion and formatting of direct quotations:

• Weave Quotes: Weave small chunks of a larger quotation into the natural flow of your writing (see examples below). 

• No Long Quotes: Do not write long quotations. A quotation should be quoted as succinctly as possible, and should almost never run more than two lines in length.

• Introduce & Explain: All quotations and paraphrased text should be introduced with a signal phrase and/or contextual information, documented with a properly formatted MLA in-text citation, and fully analyzed with two to three sentences of high-level, critical, scholarly analysis.

• Analysis Needed: Analyze each quotation by showing how the quote proves or supports some aspect of the claim you make in your topic sentence, which in-turn proves or supports the claim you make in your thesis.

• Never Start: Never start a sentence, paragraph, or essay with a quotation mark.

• Words as Words: Use italics to quote words as words (e.g. “McCarthy often writes skitter when he really means trot.”)

• Add Words: Use brackets to add words. See the example below.

• Omit Words: Omit words with an ellipsis, which is three periods and four spaces like . . . that. See example below.

Quotation Format Examples

1. The tone of “Sonnet 129” is one of disgust, for words like “waste,” “shame,” “murderous,” “rude,” and “despised” make the reader feel as if she is being scolded (Shakespeare 3-7).

2. In “Afloat in Thick Deeps: Shakespeare's Sonnets on Certainty,” Engle argues that Shakespeare's sonnets explore a “de-idealized, or anti-Platonic,” notion of how things hang together: a world view in which truth and lasting value are simply what a “mutable community” chooses to regard as “good for a longtime” (832).

3. This haughty tone can be seen, for example, in the compositions of the Countess of Dia who often extols her own “beauty, virtue, and intelligence” (Bogin 85) as within her song “A Chantar m’er de so qu’ieu non volria” as she laments “My worth and my noble birth should have some weight, / My beauty and especially my noble thoughts” (25-26). 

4. In “Sonnet 116” the bard evokes love in the presence of aging by first cautioning readers “Let [him] not to the marriage of true minds / Admit implements” (Shakespeare 1-2).

5. Shakespeare continues his analysis of love amid the ravages of time with the proclamation “Love is not love / Which alters when it alteration finds . . . or with [man’s] brief hours and weeks” (2-3, 11).

** See full MLA quotation formatting details at the link below. **

https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/research_and_citation/mla_style/mla_formatting_and_style_guide/mla_formatting_quotations.html