The Writing Center at Juniata College Quoting another person s words can add spice and life to your paper. But before you do anything rash, like add a ton of quotations to your writing, perhaps you should learn how to use quotes effectively. Quoting allows a subject to speak for himself or herself basically they can say in a few words what take you three pages to explain.
Direct quotes are things that some real person actually said or wrote at one time.
Ginsberg saw the best minds of his generation wasted by imperialism and tyranny of established government. Santa Clause smiled and said, You better be good, for goodness sake. If a quote is four or more lines in length, it should be set off from the rest of the text by starting a new line and indenting each line of the quote ten spaces from the left margin. In these cases no quotation marks are needed. If this were an actual quote that we were attempting to use in relation to the preceding paragraph, it would probably appear something like this.