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How to Quote Someone in an Essay – 5 Helpful Tips

An essay is a work in which you represent your own opinion or a point of view. Yet, sometimes, depending on the type of the project, you need to support it with reference materials and the opinion of other authors. Below, you will find some tips on how to do it correctly.

The Role of Quoting in an Essay

As a rule, essays consist of three main parts, and one of them, the body, can split into several smaller paragraphs. Depending on the type of the project, these paragraphs represent different arguments and facts, one per paragraph. Of course, rendering your own point of view, you need to provide an opinion of other reliable authors who will confirm it either directly or from the opposite. The reference materials can be given in a paraphrased form, like some author in his work says that a factor has a significant influence on a process. As well, they can be given in the form of a quote, which means that you take a phrase from the original text and insert it into your own one in accordance to certain formatting rules. Let’s see how this can be done.

How to Quote

The mentioned formatting rules depend mainly on the academic writing style that you have chosen for your project.

  1. Make sure that you know which academic writing style has been chosen for your project. In some cases, teachers inform their students at once which style to use. If you have been given no such instructions, choose the one you like better. Remember that everything within your paper must be formatted in the same style.
  2. Find a manual that explains the peculiarities of the chosen style and see what is said about the quotes. If something is unclear, turn to your teacher for additional explanations. Before you start writing, you can change the style (in case you have chosen it on your own) if you see that you don’t like something.
  3. Think about the pieces of text that you would like to quote in your essay. Regardless of the writing style, there are specific rules for prose quotations and verses.
  4. Study the rules of quoting long prose fragments that suppose omitting words or even whole phrases. Make sure that you really need the quotes be that long.
  5. Study the rules of rendering the additional information that goes with the quotes. Sometimes, you need to insert them alongside the author’s name, the title of the book, its publishing year and the publisher’s name. Sometimes, you simply need to name the source, its author, and the year of the publication. There are separate rules for the Internet links.

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