how to quote someone | HOW-TO of the week

A quotation is a reproduction of someone's exact words. Below are my personal guidelines for quoting others. These rules do not necessarily conform to any established style format such as MLA, APA, Chicago, or any other citation style. This is not meant to be a comprehensive guidebook for the use of quotation marks. It is mainly concerned with how to quote words that others have already stated (not quotations one might make up for their own writings).

1. original
Try to reproduce the person’s words as the person originally wrote, published, or spoke them. It is often preferable to quote from works that were published during the author's lifetime. On the Internet, don't accept all quotes as accurate. Look for reliable websites to check whether the words were quoted correctly and whether the right author was cited.

2. spelling
When quoting, keep original spellings. For example, this famous sonnet should be quoted as, "it is an euer fixed marke / That lookes on tempeſts and is neuer ſhaken." If you decide to modernize archaic features (e.g., changing the long ſ’s to short s’s), make a note after the quotation such as "(alphabet & spelling modernized)."

3. CaPiTaLiZaTiOn
Keep original capitalization. Do not capitalize a word in a quotation if it was not capitalized in the source. Do not make letters lowercase if they were originally capitalized. In the sonnet, I didn't capitalize the first word "it" because that word was lowercase in the original publication. There is an exception to this rule: If the writer did not capitalize God's Name or an important word like "Scripture," replace the word with its capitalized form, enclosing it in brackets (e.g., “[Lord]”).

4. punctuation
Keep original punctuation, even if it is incorrect according to modern standards. Here's another quote from the same sonnet: "LEt me not to the marriage of true mindes / Admit impediments,loue is not loue / Which alters when it alteration findes." In modern standards, a period (not a comma) should follow the word "impediments." However, it should be quoted with a comma, because that's the way the original had it. If you do modernize the punctuation, include a note. Here's an exception: if what you're quoting has "double" quotation marks inside it, change them to 'single' quotation marks. For example, "Jesus said to him, 'Follow me'" (Matthew 8:22 ESV).

5. s p a c i n g
Keep original spacing. Notice that in the last quote, there was no space here where we would expect to see one: "impediments,loue." It is acceptable to quote it that way because that's the way it was in the original publication. Again, if you modernize it, include a note.

6. bold, italics, underline
Keep texts bolded, italicized, or underlined if they were that way in the original. For example, "I told him I wanted the green one, not the gray one."
2018-10-16 update: It's ok to stylize an entire quotation with italics (e.g., the quotes at the bottom of this blog's posts). If you do this and there was something in the original quote that was italicized, then unitalicized that part to indicate that it was originally italicized.

7. fonts & colors
Obviously, when quoting, you do not have to retain the fonts or colors of the original text unless the fonts or colors are necessary for conveying the author's meaning.

8. line & page breaks
You do not have to retain line and page breaks in quotations. This includes the hyphens that might be used to divide words when they are split over two lines. However, you should indicate line breaks when quoting poetry.

9. poetry
You can use / marks to indicate link breaks in poetry, as I did for the sonnet above. Or you can format it as a block quote.

10. ellipses . . .
If you decide to skip over some word(s) in a quotation, indicate the omission with an ellipsis. For example, in this quote from J. Bayard Taylor about the German city of Leipzig, ellipsis marks show that a section of the text was skipped: "Leipsic . . . is a pleasant, friendly town." If the skipped material comes directly after the end of a sentence, use four dots (period + ellipsis). Never include ellipses at the very beginning or very end of a stand-alone quote.

11. mistakes
If an author made an obvious mistake, insert [sic] right after the incorrect word. For example, "Such was the irationality [sic] of the situation." Here, I included [sic] because the word before it is spelled incorrectly. Make sure, though, that the author wasn't just using an archaic or alternative spelling. The spelling of some English words differ between countries.

12. periods. commas,
Periods ("word.") and commas ("word,") go inside closing quotations marks. However, if there's something in parenthesis following a closing quotation mark, put the period or comma after the closing parenthesis. For example, notice where the period is here: "friendly town" (Taylor).

13. semicolons; colons:
Semicolons ("word";) and colons ("word":) go outside closing quotation marks.

14. question marks? exclamation marks!
Question marks (“‘word?’” or “‘word’?” or “‘word’”?) and exclamation marks (“‘word!’” or “‘word’!” or “‘word’”!) go either inside or outside the closing quotations marks depending upon the location of the actual question or exclamation. For example, sometimes, an entire sentence is a question; other times, just the quote within the sentence is a question.

15. purity
Never quote bad language. You can use ellipses to avoid including such words, or just try to find another source. Quote quality material.

"A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in settings of silver."
Proverbs 25:11 WEB