Quotation marks are used to indicate the beginning and end of a quote. They tell the reader when you've used written material from other sources or direct speech.
Direct quotations
A direct quotation is when you've used an item verbatim from another text. Use quotation marks at the beginning and end of a direct quotation.
When you are incorporating a short quotation into a paper or thesis, use quotation marks and quote the material exactly.
-
As film critic Pauline Kael writes, “ At his greatest, Jean Renoir expresses the beauty in our common humanity—the desires and hopes, the absurdities and follies, that we all, to one degree or another, share.”
In a double-spaced paper, indent and single space quotations longer than five typed lines.
Quotations within quotations
Use single quotation marks within double ones to indicate a quotation within a quotation.
If you are indenting and single spacing a quoted passage, however, use the same marks that appear in the passage. In the following example, the writer is quoting a passage from the critic Martin Esslin who in turn is quoting the playwright Ionesco.
-
Martin Esslin describes Ionesco's attitude towards spontaneity in this passage:
-
Ionesco regards spontaneity as an important creative element. “ I have no ideas before I write a play. I have them when I have written the play or while I am not writing at all. I believe that artistic creation is spontaneous. It certainly is so for me.” But this does not mean that he considers his writing to be meaningless or without significance. On the contrary, the workings of the spontaneous imagination are a cognitive process, an exploration.
Miscellaneous uses of quotation marks
Except to indicate direct quotations, use quotation marks sparingly. However, there are a few other possible uses of quotation marks.
Distancing yourself from an offensive term or expression.
Referring to a word as a word.
Indicating a nickname written as part of a formal name.
Setting off titles of poems, essays, and articles that are part of a longer work. (For this use, as for bibliographical and footnote information, check to see whether you are required to use a particular style guide for what you are writing.)
A summary of the rules
One of the biggest problems with quotation marks is knowing whether another mark, such as a period or comma, goes inside or outside the quotation marks. Following is a summary of the rules:
-
Put periods and commas inside quotation marks, whether or not they are part of the quotation.
-
Put question marks, exclamation points, and dashes inside quotation marks if they are part of the quotation, outside the quotation marks if they are not.
-
Put colons and semicolons outside quotation marks.
For examples, look under the individual punctuation marks covered in this section.
Using an ellipsis
An ellipsis indicates an omission from a quotation. This mark consists of spaced periods.
A three-dot ellipsis indicates that you are omitting something from a sentence that continues after the ellipsis.
The phrase “or mortgage the house” has been omitted from this quotation.
Use four dots if you are omitting the last part of a quoted sentence that ends in a period but what remains is still a complete thought. The first dot comes immediately after the sentence and has no space before it. It functions as a period. The following three dots are spaced and indicate that material has been omitted. If the original sentence ended in a question mark or exclamation point, substitute that mark for the first dot.
The phrase “before making a decision,” which ended the sentence, has been omitted from this quotation.
You can also use the four-dot ellipsis whenever your quotation skips material and then goes on to a new sentence. But make sure that your four-dot ellipsis has an independent clause on each side of it.
Cliffs Notes Online