Referencing and assignment writing  Tags: referencing essay_writing citing  

Note the following MLA conventions regarding punctuation and quotations:

• Double quotation marks are used for quotations from other texts
• Commas and periods that come directly after a quotation go inside, not outside the quotation marks:

“The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily,” notes Miss Prism about her novel in Oscar Wilde’s play The Importance of Being Earnest (23).

• However, if a parenthetical reference comes directly after the quotation, then the comma or period should be placed after the reference:

In Oscar Wilde’s play The Importance of Being Earnest, Miss Prism summarizes her novel by noting “The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily” (23).

• If you are slightly altering a word or phrase in a quotation so that the quotation fits your grammatical context, use square brackets to indicate this:

According to Oscar Wilde’s Miss Prism, fiction can be summarized by the maxim, “The good [end] happily, and the bad unhappily” (23).

If you cannot find an example for what you are looking for then use the MLA manual.

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