“A Sound of Thunder” is a short story by Ray Bradbury. He’s currently on Chapter 2, “How to Teach Your Dog to Roll Over.” “Mad Girl’s Love Song” is a poem by Sylvia Plath. Titles of shorter works, such as poems, chapter titles, and short stories, are placed in quotation marks. Most style guides dictate that titles of books, films, magazines, newspapers, and other large works be italicized. So we’ve come here today to dramatize a shameful condition. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languished in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One example can be found in his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s speeches often utilized parallel structure to emphasize key points. Refer to your designated style guide for specific rules regarding how long a quote should be before it becomes a block quote (although five or more lines is generally a good rule). Although they are direct quotes, direct quotes do not need quotation marks because they are usually separated from the text (in a new paragraph with indented margins, a different font style, or by some other distinction). Run-in quotations are shorter quotes (like the examples above) that take the same format as the regular text that surrounds it.īlock quotes, on the other hand, are longer quotes that are separated from their surrounding text. However, if information is simply being paraphrased, quotation marks are not needed. In nonfiction, quotes are usually included to present information from other sources.
In fiction, however, quotations are used to create dialogue, and dialogue is an excellent way to let your characters speak for themselves and move the plot along more naturally. If you were sending a text to a friend, for instance, you would probably use the second method and simply relay what John said.
Quotes like the example above are usually best suited for creative writing. John said it’s getting late and maybe we should go home. Note that you could also relay what John said without a direct quotation: Use quotation marks when you want to use the exact words of someone else in your writing. Quotation marks should be used to directly quote the words of someone else, with titles of short works, and when indicating certain words as words. There are some specific rules you’ll need to follow, however, especially once you throw in other punctuations or mix quotes within quotes. Whether you want to liven up your book’s scenes with dialogue or simply give credit where it’s due in your research paper, you’ll need to use quotation marks to attribute words to a speaker.