How to Write a Long Quote in an Essay

Example of a Long Quote

Including quotes in your essay helps lend legitimacy to your paper because it indicates that your arguments are based on research or an established author's ideas. Many teachers and professors require the use of quotations in student essays to ensure the quality of the work. Long quotes are verbatim sections of prose or verse that take up four or more lines on your essay, and they should be written differently than shorter quotes. They also contain more ideas that you can use to build your essay's argument.

Things You'll Need

• Cited work (book, magazine, textbook)

Instructions

1. Locate the quote in your book. Make sure the quote benefits your argument before you select the quote. There may be quotes in the book that are more suitable for your purpose.

2. Search Google Books or Project Gutenberg for online versions of the book. This way, you do not have to type the entire quote.

3. Copy the desired quote from the electronic version and paste it into your document. Format the text to make it suitable for your essay by deleting unnecessary spaces and line breaks. Texts from Project Gutenberg are formatted specifically for that website and may have line breaks that are inappropriate for your essay.

4. Type the quote if your book is not available in an electronic version. Place the book open in front of you and carefully type word for word to maintain the accuracy of the author's words.

5. Place the long quotation in a freestanding text block without quotation marks. Long quotes are more than four lines of text. Because there are no quotation marks, you will differentiate the quote from the rest of the essay through formatting. Do this by starting the quote on a new line. Indent the entire quote one inch from the left margin.

6. Omit words in the quote by using ellipses, or three periods, to indicate an omission. This should be done only if it benefits your paper. An appropriate situation to do this is when the quote is too long and contains ideas that aren't relevant to your paper.

7. Add words to the quote by using brackets. Brackets indicate that the enclosed words are not part of the original text. This should be done to clarify quotes that lack context. For example, "She is going there" is vague as opposed to "[The mother] is going [to the store]." This option should be used sparingly to avoid misquoting the original author.

8. Include the parenthetical citation after the last punctuation. To cite, type the author's last name and the page number in parentheses. It should look like this: (Hemingway 88).

References

• Formatting Quotations

Resources

• Read this Article in Spanish
• Google Books
• Project Gutenberg