If your activity is in one way or another related to writing texts, and even more so - scientific works, articles, essays, literary compositions and reviews, in working with the text you, like any other author, cannot do without quoting. Quoting, or publishing in your text a verbatim excerpt from someone else's text, can expand the meaning of your work, give it additional atmosphere and color, but in order for quotes to play a positive role in the text, you need to be able to correctly format them.
Instructions
Step 1
The quote should be appropriate in meaning and content, and it should not be too voluminous, and should be transmitted verbatim without distortion in the original text.
Step 2
When inserting someone's quote into your text, do not cut it off in an unnatural place and do not try to artificially adjust the meaning of the quote to the meaning of your text if the quote did not suit you initially.
Step 3
Do not take parts of the quotation out of context and do not retell the quote, interspersing the retelling with the original insertions.
Step 4
Use a sentence or passage in its entirety without breaking it and keeping the logic of the story in mind. The sentence you are citing must be complete.
Step 5
Most often, quotes are highlighted using quotation marks. At the beginning of a quote, put an opening quotation mark, and after its last sign - a closing one. Also, to make the quote more visible in the text, you can make it italic or smaller than your own text.
Step 6
Never change the inner content of a quote - keep it the way the author created it. You can only highlight some words with additional formatting tools - for example, the most important, in your opinion, points can be highlighted in bold.
Step 7
Any changes within a quotation (for example, italicizing individual words) should be indicated immediately after it in parentheses, or placed in a footnote. The author of the quotation should always be indicated immediately after the quotation marks, in brackets.
Step 8
If you are commenting on a quote, after the comment, put a full stop, dash and your initials, or the initials of the person who left the comment on the quote.
Step 9
Put a colon between your text and the quote following it, if your words precede the appearance of a quote. You can also put a full stop before the quote after your words if there is a complete sentence before the quote. If a quote just complements your sentence, becoming, as it were, an organic part of it, punctuation marks are not needed at all.
Step 10
After the closing quotation marks, if there are no characters in front of them, put a period. The period is always placed after quotation marks, and question and exclamation marks are always placed before them. If there is an ellipsis in front of the closing quotation mark, no characters are used.
Step 11
There are also rules according to which quotes must be started with a lowercase or uppercase letter. A quote should be started with a capital letter if it is the beginning of a full sentence.
