Student's guide to writing college papers, Fourth edition - Kate L. Turabian 2010

Adding quotations to your text
Quoting, paraphrasing, and summarizing sources
Writing your paper

You can insert quotations into your text in two ways:

✵ For four or fewer lines, use a run-in quotation by putting the quoted words on the same line as your text.

✵ For five or more lines, use a block quotation set off as a separate, indented unit.

You can integrate both run-in and block quotations into your text in two ways:

1. Include the quotation as an independent clause, sentence, or passage:

Jared Diamond reminds us that “circumstances change, and past primacy is no guarantee of future primacy” (417).

Jared Diamond says, “The histories of the Fertile Crescent and China . . . hold a salutary lesson for the modern world: circumstances change, and past primacy is no guarantee of future primacy” (417).

According to Jared Diamond,

Because technology begets more technology, the importance of an invention's diffusion potentially exceeds the importance of the original invention. Technology's history exemplifies what is termed an autocatalytic process: that is, one that speeds up at a rate that increases with time, because the process catalyzes itself. (301)

2. Weave the quotation into the grammar of your own sentence:

As Diamond points out, the “lesson for the modern world” in the history of the Fertile Crescent and China is that you can't count on history to repeat itself because “circumstances change, and past primacy is no guarantee of future primacy” (417).

To make a quotation grammatically mesh with your own sentence, you can modify it, so long as you don't change its meaning and you clearly indicate added or changed words with square brackets and deletions with three dots (called ellipses). This sentence quotes the original intact:

Posner focuses on religion not for its spirituality, but for its social functions: “A notable feature of American society is religious pluralism, and we should consider how this relates to the efficacy of governance by social norms in view of the historical importance of religion as both a source and enforcer of such norms” (299).

This version modifies the quotation to fit the grammar of the writer's sentence:

In his discussion of religion, Posner says of American society that “a notable feature . . . is [its] religious pluralism.” He argues that to understand how well social norms control what we do, we should consider “the historical importance of religion as both a source and enforcer of such norms” (299).