Correct Usage of Quotation Marks in Academic Writing.
How to Put a Quote in an Essay How to write a quote. Incorporating direct quotes into your writing is an excellent way to expand upon and back up your ideas with solid, fact based evidence. Additionally, quotes help to support your argument and can be used to develop your topic ideas or thesis statement.
While quotations are necessary for most types of writing, too many quotation marks, whether double or single quotation marks, can make your writing seem heavy-handed. To ensure quotation marks have been properly used in your writing, consider sending it to the professionals at Scribendi for proofreading.
For quotations which extend beyond one paragraph, a quotation mark begins each paragraph and the closing quotation mark is at the end of the last paragraph. Some writers put a comma before a quotation and some leave it out.
Specific paired punctuation is used in writing to set words off from other words in the same sentence. These paired punctuations such as brackets can be used as delimiters to determine the order of performing calculations within a mathematical equation, or to alert the reader to text that is not part of a quotation, is incorrect in its original form, or has been omitted.
The example above uses American-style quotation marks. The main quote is enclosed in double quotation marks. The quote within the quote, Do unto others as you would have them do unto you, is enclosed in single quotation marks.(The British convention is the opposite; the main quote would use single quotation marks and the quote within the quote would use double quotation marks.).
When writers insert or alter words in a direct quotation, square brackets—( )—are placed around the change. The brackets, always used in pairs, enclose words intended to clarify meaning, provide a brief explanation, or to help integrate the quote into the writer’s sentence.
Here are a few general tips for setting off your block quotations: Set up a block quotation with your own words followed by a colon. Indent. You normally indent 4-5 spaces for the start of a paragraph. When setting up a block quotation, indent the entire paragraph once from the left-hand margin.