Direct Quotations

Summarizing the Rules 

You can directly quote up to 40 words in one quotation. Make sure you don’t overuse direct quotations. Your essay should include only up to two short direct quotations, appearing in separate paragraphs. It takes skill and a good understanding of the text to decide when a direct quotation is appropriate. Essays with a lot of direct quotations get lower scores as they don’t serve the purpose of academic writing, which is to demonstrate your knowledge and personal writing style.

• If you are quoting a whole sentence from a text, start with a capital letter and end with a full stop. 
  
• If you are quoting part of a sentence start with a lowercase letter and don’t add a full stop in the end
• Your quoted text always appears within quotation marks. If you forget to add them your quotation will be considered plagiarism.
• Never forget to add the citation in brackets directly after the quotation
• Citations always have a standard order. You cannot reverse it or change it in any way
• Based on the APA format, the order of a citation appearing in the text is as follows: (Author’s surname + comma + year of publication +comma + book page).
• Based on the APA format, if you are quoting a text with more than one author, the citation appears in the text as follows: (Name of the first author + et al. + comma + year of publication).
• If you are quoting from an internet site without an author you follow this format: (+ website URL+).
• If the text you are quoting is not part of a book with numbered pages the format you follow is (Author’s surname + comma + year)

Let’s look at some examples: 

1. 1. Discrimination against blacks appears in the form of “aversive racism” (Alport et al., 1956, p.37). Here you see an example of a direct quotation of a term that cannot be paraphrased as it is a scientific term in sociology created by the author of the text.
   2. Vilani et al. believe that “Spirituality and religiosity have been found to be positive predictors of subjective well-being, even if results are not altogether consistent across studies.” (Vilani et al., 2019). This is a direct quotation involving a complete sentence. It starts with a capital letter and ends with a full stop. Notice that although the name of the author has already been mentioned at the beginning of the sentence, you still have to write it again when you cite your source. The quoted article has more than one author but Vilani appearing is the first name that appears in the original text. For this reason, only one surname is mentioned and the phrase et al. represents all other authors of the article. This saves space as many scientific articles can have up to 10 contributors.
   3. The university’s career advisors “foster partnerships with employers, alumni, faculty, staff, administrators, and the greater community” (https://new.paragoniu.edu.kh/current-students/student-services/). In this example, the quoted text comes from Paragon University’s website so the whole URL is copied and added.