When a verb in a quotation does not fit syntactically into your sentence, you may use brackets to change the tense: If Charles Dickens were… Read More
If you need to shorten a title within quotation marks that begins with a title in quotation marks, use the title within the title as… Read More
Yes, an essay may start with a block quotation. The quotation should be important to your discussion and referred to in your prose. This distinguishes it… Read More
How you punctuate quoted dialogue from a novel will depend on what you are quoting and how you are quoting it. See the three most… Read More
Citing from a play that has both verse and prose sections—whether the play is William Shakespeare’s Macbeth or August Wilson’s Fences—is no different from citing… Read More
Yes. Clarity is worth the trouble of more punctuation. Let’s say you quote the following two lines of poetry: He had forty-two boxes, all carefully packed,… Read More
The MLA Handbook notes, “By convention, commas and periods that directly follow quotations go inside the closing quotation marks” (267). Thus, in the following sentence, the comma… Read More
The way you cite song lyrics will vary depending on how you access them and how much information you include in the body of your… Read More
Include the page span in your in-text citation: (62–63) (Jones 137–38) See the MLA Handbook, section 2.5.1, for how to style nonconsecutive page ranges. Read More
Like a semicolon, a colon can connect two independent clauses . . . Read More