When should a block quotation be used?

In APA, a block quotation is an extract consisting of more than forty words from another author’s work. Block quotations should be used in moderation—typically when using another writer’s words is the most effective way of illustrating an idea. Avoid using block quotations excessively as this practice gives the reader the impression that you are inexperienced in the subject or are simply filling pages to meet a word-count requirement. Remember that the conversational model of academic writing encouraged by Geneseo’s writing seminar centers on your ability to join and facilitate a scholarly conversation, not on the voices of others who are already fully admitted to that conversation by virtue of having published peer-reviewed work on a topic. 

How should a block quotation be formatted?

While a short quotation is enclosed in quotation marks and integrated into the surrounding paragraph, a block quotation is an independent paragraph that is indented five spaces from the left margin. This type of quotation should be double-spaced like the rest of the paper, but it should not be enclosed in quotation marks. In a block quotation, the parenthetical in-text citation should follow directly after the end punctuation of the final sentence. Note the placement order of the quotation marks, parentheses, and period.

Let’s look at two examples. One tangential question you might have when you read them is about the word sic: sic is a word that you, as the editor of someone else’s quoted material, add to a quotation to signal your awareness that there’s something erroneous in the quotation (here, it’s the clearly accidental “gaining obtaining” phrase) but to reassure readers that the quotation is nonetheless accurate even though the spelling or logic might make them think otherwise. Additionally, sic signals clearly that the error was in the original and didn’t occur in your copying. Although we’re italicizing sic here because it’s the word under discussion, it is actually an English word (from a Latin root), so you don’t italicize it when you use it. You do, however, put it within square editorial brackets, not within the rounded parentheses you use to enclose citation information. Don’t mix up square and rounded parentheses; the difference is not aesthetic, but rather signals in both APA and MLA that the material enclosed in square brackets is something the editor (you) has added to the source material. You can use it to include your own clarifications to cited material, which is often necessary when you remove a quotation from its original context, and suddenly it’s no longer clear what an “it” or a “this” refers to. 

Note that although the block quotation is formatted as a separate block of text, it is preceded by an introductory phrase or sentence(s) followed by a colon. If the author’s name and the year of publication appear in the introductory sentence, the parenthetical in-text citation at the end of the paragraph should simply include the page number(s) of the original text, as shown in this example: