MLA Quotation Guide

Rule #1: NO PLOPS

All quotes must be set-up with phrasing or integrated into sentence. A quote may not just be PLOPPED down into a paragraph. (See types below*.)

Rule #2: EXPLAIN

If you are bothering to quote details from a text, they ought to have some sort of significance or meaning and thus require further explanation. As you become better at analyzing literature, the ratio of explanation to quotation tips in favor of explanation.

Rule #3: CITE

All quotes need to be cited with “a page number for prose” or line number for poetry (4). If the author of the quotation is “not clear from context”, the author’s last name should be cited also (Jones 12). Notice the period comes after the citation. Notice there is no comma between author’s name and page number. Notice the spacing around citation. The citation is always at the end of the sentence in which the quote appears.

*Quote Format Types

1.     Integrated: The most versatile and effective; choose key word or phrase from source text and integrate into the sentence you are writing. No special punctuation is necessary other than the quotation marks themselves.

What makes a true war story is not whether the events actually happened; what makes a war story true is whether or not it makes the “stomach believe” (78). It is the truth of the feelings experienced that matter in a story, not the actual occurrence of events.

2.     Direct: This is for quoting full sentences; notice that it too must be set-up with phrasing; I like to use a colon before the quotation, but a comma is also acceptable.

When Fossie confronts Mary Anne in the Greenies’ hut, she tells him: “There’s no sense talking…I know what you think, but it’s not …it’s not bad” (111). Mary Anne has changed so much because of her experiences in Vietnam and seems to realize that Fossie will never be able to understand her; that is why there is “no sense talking”. She also knows that he views her as a person who is lost.

3.     Block: A block quote is really a direct quote that is formatted differently. The source text is quoted separate and indented from the text of your essay it must also be set-up with appropriate phrasing; use increase indent buttons to make block quote work; block quotes always use a colon, do not use quotation marks (unless they are in source text), and unlike other MLA quotations, the period comes before the citation.

As he is telling Mary Anne’s story, Rat Kiley often interrupts the narrative to comment on its meaning:

       What happened to her, Rat said, was what happened to all of them. You come over clean and you get dirty and then afterward it’s never the same…Some make it intact, some don’t make it all. (114) 

Rat is suggesting that the Mary Anne of his story represents all the soldiers who suffer the intensity of the war. They come over as innocent and naïve young people, but are changed, like Mary Anne, so radically by their experiences that they go home completely different people, if they ever go home at all.