Published on 15 April 2022 by Shona McCombes and Jack Caulfield. Revised on 3 September 2022.
Quoting means copying a passage of someone else’s words and crediting the source. To quote a source, you must ensure:
The exact format of a quote depends on its length and on which citation style you are using. Quoting and citing correctly is essential to avoid plagiarism, which is easy to detect with a good plagiarism checker.
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Every time you quote, you must cite the source correctly. This looks slightly different depending on the citation style you’re using.
When you include a quote in Harvard style, you must add a Harvard in-text citation giving the author’s last name, the year of publication, and a page number if available. Any full stop or comma appears after the citation, not within the quotation marks.
Citations can be parenthetical or narrative. In a parenthetical citation, you place all the information in brackets after the quote. In a narrative citation, you name the author in your sentence (followed by the year), and place the page number after the quote.
There are three main strategies you can use to introduce quotes in a grammatically correct way:
The following examples use APA Style citations, but these strategies can be used in all styles.
Introduce the quote with a full sentence ending in a colon. Don’t use a colon if the text before the quote isn’t a full sentence.
If you name the author in your sentence, you may use present-tense verbs, such as “states’, ‘argues’, ‘explains’, ‘writes’, or ‘reports’, to describe the content of the quote.
You can also use a signal phrase that mentions the author or source but doesn’t form a full sentence. In this case, you follow the phrase with a comma instead of a colon.
To quote a phrase that doesn’t form a full sentence, you can also integrate it as part of your sentence, without any extra punctuation.
When you quote text that itself contains another quote, this is called a nested quotation or a quote within a quote. It may occur, for example, when quoting dialogue from a novel.
To distinguish this quote from the surrounding quote, you enclose it in double (instead of single) quotation marks (even if this involves changing the punctuation from the original text). Make sure to close both sets of quotation marks at the appropriate moments.
Note that if you only quote the nested quotation itself, and not the surrounding text, you can just use single quotation marks.
Avoid relying too heavily on quotes in academic writing. To integrate a source, it’s often best to paraphrase, which means putting the passage into your own words. This helps you integrate information smoothly and keeps your own voice dominant.
However, there are some situations in which quotes are more appropriate.
If you want to comment on how the author uses language (for example, in literary analysis), it’s necessary to quote so that the reader can see the exact passage you are referring to.
Example: Using quotes to analyze language You are writing a paper about the novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald. You will have to quote frequently from the novels in order to analyze their language and style.
To convince the reader of your argument, interpretation or position on a topic, it’s often helpful to include quotes that support your point. Quotes from primary sources (for example, interview transcripts or historical documents) are especially credible as evidence.
Example: Using quotes as evidence You are working on a paper about the causes of the French Revolution, and you have studied documents and letters written at the time. You can quote from these sources as evidence in support of your argument.
When you’re referring to secondary sources such as scholarly books and journal articles, try to put others’ ideas in your own words when possible.
But if a passage does a great job at expressing, explaining, or defining something, and it would be very difficult to paraphrase without changing the meaning or losing the weakening the idea’s impact, it’s worth quoting directly.
Example: Quoting to present a theory Your interpretation of survey data is supported by a well-known theory on your topic. You find a sentence that perfectly sums up the theory, so you quote it directly before elaborating on your understanding of the theory.
A quote is an exact copy of someone else’s words, usually enclosed in quotation marks and credited to the original author or speaker.
To present information from other sources in academic writing, it’s best to paraphrase in most cases. This shows that you’ve understood the ideas you’re discussing and incorporates them into your text smoothly.
It’s appropriate to quote when:
Every time you quote a source, you must include a correctly formatted in-text citation. This looks slightly different depending on the citation style.
For example, a direct quote in APA is cited like this: ‘This is a quote’ (Streefkerk, 2020, p. 5).
Every in-text citation should also correspond to a full reference at the end of your paper.
In scientific subjects, the information itself is more important than how it was expressed, so quoting should generally be kept to a minimum. In the arts and humanities, however, well-chosen quotes are often essential to a good paper.
In social sciences, it varies. If your research is mainly quantitative, you won’t include many quotes, but if it’s more qualitative, you may need to quote from the data you collected.
As a general guideline, quotes should take up no more than 5–10% of your paper. If in doubt, check with your instructor or supervisor how much quoting is appropriate in your field.
If you’re quoting from a text that paraphrases or summarises other sources and cites them in parentheses, APA recommends retaining the citations as part of the quote:
Footnote or endnote numbers that appear within quoted text should be omitted.
If you want to cite an indirect source (one you’ve only seen quoted in another source), either locate the original source or use the phrase ‘as cited in’ in your citation.
A block quote is a long quote formatted as a separate ‘block’ of text. Instead of using quotation marks, you place the quote on a new line, and indent the entire quote to mark it apart from your own words.
APA uses block quotes for quotes that are 40 words or longer.
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