Wikipedia articles abound in direct quotations. Managing the inclusion of wordings from sources requires skill. This workshop includes a series of show-and-tell exercises in which you can test your skill in formatting and manipulating quoted material in running prose.
There are four guiding principles to good quoting practice:
- be true to the intended meaning in the source;
- integrate quotations into the article text as smoothly as possible;
- brevity is usually desirable;
- try to shield the readers from poor English in the source.
There are three basic devices for manipulating quoted text to achieve good practice:
- shifting the quotation marks to manipulate the boundary between direct quotation and paraphrase;
- using square brackets within a quotation to insert paraphrased text, for brevity, to supply the larger context, or to correct or disambiguate wording that may be unclear to the readers;
- the insertion of ellipsis points to indicate that original text has been omitted;
The way quoted material is embedded into a sentence often involves introductory text, punctuation, and/or a speech verb.