Quoting is the easiest way to use sources in a research document, but it also requires care in using it properly so that you don’t accidentally plagiarize, misquote, or overquote. At its simplest, quoting takes source text exactly as it is and puts quotation marks (“ ”) around that text to set it off from your own words.

The World Wildlife Fund reminds us that “although the Amazon may not be in your backyard, it should be on your mind.” (“3 Ways You Can Help Protect the Amazon.”)

In this case, we are quoting the whole sentence, since it nicely captures the spirit of the WWF’s latest Amazon initiative. If the meaning, rather than the tone, is more important to us, we could shorten the quote:

The latest web campaign by the World Wildlife Fund reminds the reader that the Amazon “should be on your mind.” (“3 Ways You Can Help Protect the Amazon.”)

The following points present conventions and best practices when quoting:

Use double quotation marks (“ ”).

Use single quotation marks only for reported speech when you have a quotation within a quotation, as in, “The minister responded to say, ‘No comment at this time’ regarding the allegations of wrongdoing.”

Use double quotation marks for putting a single word or two in “scare quotes” when you’re drawing attention to how people use certain words and phrases—again, not single quotation marks since there is no such thing as quotation marks “lite.”

Quote purposefully: Quote only when the original wording is important. When we quote famous thinkers like Albert Einstein or Frederick Douglass, we often use their exact words because no one could say it better or more interestingly than they did. Also quote when you want your audience to see wording exactly as it appeared in the source text or as it was said in speech so that they can be sure that you’re not distorting the words as you might if you paraphrased instead. But if there’s nothing special about the original wording, then it’s better to paraphrase than to quote.

Quote accurately: Don’t misquote by editing the source text on purpose or fouling up a transcription accidentally. Quotation requires the exact transcription of the source text, which means writing the same words in the same order in your document as you found them in the original.

Block-quote sparingly if at all: In rare circumstances, you may want to quote a few sentences or even a paragraph at length if it’s important to represent every single word. If so, the convention is to tab the passage in on both the left and right, not use quotation marks at all, set up the quotation with a signal phrase or sentence ending with a colon, and place the in-text citation following the final period of the block quotation. Consider the following example:

Students frequently overuse direct quotation [when] taking notes, and as a result they overuse quotations in the final [research] paper. Probably only about 10% of your final manuscript should appear as directly quoted matter. Therefore, you should strive to limit the amount of exact transcribing of source materials while taking notes. (Lester 46-47)

Don’t overquote: As the above block-quote suggests, a good rule of thumb is that your completed document should contain no more than 10% quoted material. Much above that will look lazy because it appears that you’re getting quotation to write your document for you. Quote no more than a sentence or two at a time if you quote at all.

A quote by the conservationist John Muir. Note the ellipsis at the beginning of the quote. The original quote begins: “Every one of these parks, great and small, is a garden filled knee-deep with fresh, lovely flowers of every hue, the most luxuriant and the most extravagantly beautiful of all the alpine gardens I ever beheld in all my mountain-top wanderings.”

Use brackets and ellipses to indicate edits to quotations: If you need to edit a quotation to be grammatically consistent with your own sentences framing the quotation (e.g., so that the tense is consistently past-tense if it is present-tense in the source text), add clarifying words, or delete words, do so using brackets for changed words and ellipses for deleted words as you can see in the Lester block quotation above.

• Though many people mistakenly refer to parentheses ( ) as “brackets”, brackets are squared [ ] and are used mainly to indicate changes to quoted words, whereas parentheses follow the quotation and mark off the citation.  If you were to clarify and streamline the final sentence of the block quotation a few points above, for instance, you could say something like:
  • Lester (1976) recommends “limit[ing] the amount of exact transcribing . . . while taking notes” (p. 47). Here, the verb “limit” in the source text needs to be converted into its participle form (having an -ing ending) to follow the past-tense verb in the sentence framing the quotation grammatically. Sneakily adding the “ing” to “limit” without using brackets would be misquotation because “limiting” appears nowhere in the original.
• Use the ellipsis (. . .) only to show that you’re skipping over unnecessary words within a quotation (not at the beginning or end).
  • In the sentence “Lester (1976) recommends ‘limit[ing] the amount of exact transcribing . . . while taking notes’ (p. 47),” The ellipsis replaces the unnecessary “of source materials” in the original sentence.
• Be careful not to use brackets and ellipses in a way that distorts or obscures the meaning of the original text. For instance, omitting “Probably” and changing “should” to “[can]” in the Lester quotation above will turn his soft guideline into a hard rule, which are not the same.
  • “Probably only about 10% of your final manuscript should appear as directly quoted matter” becomes “Only . . . 10% of your final manuscript [can] appear as directly quoted matter.”
• If the quotation includes writing errors such as spelling mistakes, show that they’re the author’s (rather than yours) by adding “[sic]” immediately after each error (“sic” abbreviates sic erat scriptum, Latin for “thus it had been written”), as in:
  • “When you said in the class discussion forum, ‘No one cares about grammer, [sic] it doesnt [sic] really matter,’ you undermined your credibility on the topic with poor spelling and a comma splice.”
• Capitalize as in the original, even if it seems strange to start a quotation with a capital (because it was the first word in the original) though it’s no longer the first word because it follows a signal phrase in your sentence. See the example in the point above, for instance.

Cite according to the appropriate style guide (MLA, APA, etc.) (see the section on style guides and citation). All quotations, paraphrases, and summaries need to be cited.