Formatting quotations

In quoting material in a research paper, you generally embed quotes of three lines or less within your own text, placing quotation marks around them. If the quote is longer than three lines, set it off as an indented block of text instead of using quotation marks.

Example of using a quote of less than three lines (from Hazel Carby's Reconstructing Womanhood, a book on how slavery influenced black women writers in the U.S.):

    Carby states that in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, "Linda's early childhood was happy, and only on the death of her mother did Linda learn that she was a slave." (51) I will show, however, that Linda's early childhood was actually a frightening time that determined her later relationship with her master.

*Note: this is an example of citing a page number in Modern Language Association format. You simply put the page number in parentheses after the quotation. If you haven't stated the author's name when introducing the quotation, you write the author's last name before the page number (Carby 51). However, the very first time you quote a source, you must provide a footnote with complete information about the source. This quotation, therefore, is not the first one from this book. A complete list of Works Cited would appear at the end of the paper.