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The Online Writing Lab (OWL) at Purdue University houses writing resources and instructional materia... Students, members of the community, and users worldwide will find information to assist with many writing projects. Teachers and trainers may use this material for in-class and out-of-class instruction.

A guide for incorporating quotes into sentences, in-text and parenthetical citations included. When considering incorporating quotes, consider if paraphrasing or quoting adds most to your sentence, paragraph, etc. When selecting a quote, consider the "10-word rule," to get to the most valuable information from the quote (anyone can cut-and-past paragraphs), decrease in conventions errors (less unnecessary words = less opportunity for errors), and fluency. Once you've incorporated a quote into your sentence, try reading the sentence out loud, same sentence, without the quotation marks. If it's unreadable, revise how you've placed the quote in your sentence.

The left navigation bar can serve as a guide to any specific formatting issues you may be struggling with when writing in MLA format.

Shared through Purdue's OWL (Online Writing Lab), this paper is a model for students struggling to write papers in MLA format. You can download the model for current and future writing assignments.

This handout is intended to help you become more comfortable with the uses of and distinctions among quotations, paraphrases, and summaries. This handout compares and contrasts the three terms, gives some pointers, and includes a short excerpt that you can use to practice these skills.