How to Cite a Quotation

Video Transcript

"Hi, this is Laura Turner, and today we're going to talk about how to cite quotations. Citing quotations is going to be different depending on your professor and how your professor wants it done, but generally quotations are - they're cited within a line or going to be called in line citations. And they are going to be cited by quoting and then of course adding the author's last name and the page number of the book, within the punctuation of the line. So like in my example here, John Stow states that puritan was the name that several congregations of Anabaptists in London gave themselves in the fifteen-sixties, so everything from the quotes in the highlighted area here is your quotation, and earliest recorded uses of the word are all derogatory. And then you have Smith, three-twenty, so Smith said all of this stuff right here. So next sometimes you'll have footnotes at the end of your page, so you will not actually have, well actually you will. If you have a footnote that says you know, refer to number one down the bottom, but usually you're going to have an in line citation for stuff like that. The thing to avoid when citing quotes is leaving out parts of the quotes and forgetting to use quotation marks. If you paraphrase something that someone said you should probably still cite out to the side what they - the page number and the area from which you got this idea. And finally when you're using part of the sentence from a book or you're using like in this example here I used parts of speeches from one of Shakespeare's plays. I used an ellipsis, or three dots in between the lines that I did not use. So for example have you no wit, manners nor honesty? Then I have an ellipsis because I skipped a few lines. And then we go onto the next line. Okay. And you can do that in quotes from books as well, you can sort of take a quote from the same page or you know, from a little further down on the next page, all you have to do is add an ellipsis in, so you can keep it all together as one big quote. Okay. And of course whenever you're citing Shakespeare, you should use as I have in this example, the act number, the scene number and the lines of citation. This is something that your Shakespeare professor will probably tell you how they want it to be done, and some of them like Roman numerals, some of them are okay with regular numbers. But this is of course the act two, scene three, line seventy-four through seventy-seven in this citation. Okay. So this is just some ways to cite quotations."