MLA Handbook by The Modern Language Association of America

Author:The Modern Language Association of America [America, The Modern Language Association of]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781603292658
Publisher: The Modern Language Association of America
Published: 2016-04-01T00:00:00+00:00

1.3.2 Prose

If a prose quotation runs no more than four lines and requires no special emphasis, put it in quotation marks and incorporate it into the text.

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” wrote Charles Dickens of the eighteenth century.

You need not always reproduce complete sentences. Sometimes you may want to quote just a word or phrase as part of your sentence.

For Charles Dickens the eighteenth century was both “the best of times” and “the worst of times.”

(The sample sentences so far in this section include quotations but don’t end with citations. Not every sentence with borrowed material has to contain a citation. If you draw repeatedly from a source without referring to another one, you can often wait to provide the citations until you’re done using the source in your text (see sec. 3.5). Some sources (especially online publications) lack page numbers or fixed part numbers and so offer no numbers to be cited.) You may put a quotation at the beginning, middle, or end of your sentence or, for the sake of variety or better style, divide it by your own words.

Joseph Conrad writes of the company manager in Heart of Darkness, “He was obeyed, yet he inspired neither love nor fear, nor even respect.”

or

“He was obeyed,” writes Joseph Conrad of the company manager in Heart of Darkness, “yet he inspired neither love nor fear, nor even respect.”

If a quotation ending a sentence requires a parenthetical reference, place the sentence period after the reference. + Punctuation with quotations: 1.3.7

For Charles Dickens the eighteenth century was both “the best of times” and “the worst of times” (35).

“He was obeyed,” writes Joseph Conrad of the company manager in Heart of Darkness, “yet he inspired neither love nor fear, nor even respect” (87).

If a quotation extends to more than four lines when run into your text, set it off from the text as a block indented half an inch from the left margin. Do not indent the first line an extra amount or add quotation marks not present in the original. A colon introduces a quotation displayed in this way except when the grammatical connection between your introductory wording and the quotation requires a different mark of punctuation or none at all. A parenthetical reference for a prose quotation set off from the text follows the last line of the quotation.

At the conclusion of Lord of the Flies, Ralph, realizing the horror of his actions, is overcome by

great, shuddering spasms of grief that seemed to wrench his whole body. His voice rose under the black smoke before the burning wreckage of the island; and infected by that emotion, the other little boys began to shake and sob too. (186)

If a new paragraph begins in the middle of the quotation, indent its first line.

In Moll Flanders Defoe follows the picaresque tradition by using a pseudoautobiographical narration:

My true name is so well known in the records, or registers, at Newgate and in the Old Bailey, and there are

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