Follow the guidelines in your writer’s handbook for showing any changes you make within a quotation and for how to introduce a quotation. All quotations must be introduced. Try introducing your quotation with the writer’s name, and be sure to enclose all quoted material within quotation marks. Page numbers stand outside the quotation marks but inside the period. Several examples follow:
* Using MLA formatting. Karen Elizabeth Gordon writes in her introduction to The New Well-Tempered Sentence, "However frenzied or disarrayed or complicated your thoughts may be, punctuation tempers them and sends signals to your reader about how to take them in" (ix).
* Using APA formatting. Gordon (1993) says of the exclamation point, "What a wild, reckless, willful invention! How could we possibly live without it! Who needs words when we have this flasher!" (p. 1).
* Using Turabian formatting - Karen Elizabeth Gordon thinks of the comma as "a delicate kink in time, a pause within a sentence, a chance to catch your breath."1
NOTE: At the bottom of the page, the following footnote would appear:
1Karen Elizabeth Gordon, The New Well-Tempered Sentence: A Punctuation Handbook for the Innocent, the Eager, and the Doomed (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1993), 21.* Using AAA formatting - According to Karen Elizabeth Gordon in The Deluxe Transitive Vampire, "The verb is the heartthrob of a sentence. Without a verb, a subject would be abandoned, stranded in a sentence, incapable of sensing the void" (1993:40).
Remember, quote strategically to emphasize your point and never quote simply because you are unwilling to do the hard work of paraphrasing the material.
* Note: If you are writing a paper for a literature class, the guidelines are different. Frequent quoting of your primary source (story, poem, novel, creative essay, or play) is important in order to provide your reader with direct evidence. In other words, you are bringing pertinent parts of the text into your paper to show that your interpretation is sound and based on the writer's actual words. Again, all quotations are introduced, but how you introduce a quotation depends on who is speaking. Remember, in a creative text, the narrator speaks, as do characters. "It" never says or shows anything, and an author rarely speaks directly (creative nonfiction essays are an exception). For more detailed information on writing about literature, see our mini-course titled Literature Papers.
If you imagine a reader for your paper who is truly interested and wants to know what you have discovered, you will motivate yourself to attend to the hard work of making your research both interesting and legitimate.