Using Quotations in Your Essay - Studyhood.
In your writing, sometimes you may need to include the title of a magazine, the headline of a newspaper article, the title of a song or movie, and so on. In English, when punctuating these magazine titles, headlines, and song or movie titles, keep in mind these two options: Put the title in quotation marks.
Don’t Quote Just for the Sake of Quoting. We all know you should use at least a few quotes to support your research essay, but you shouldn’t just throw them in because a research paper needs quotes. Don’t pick a few random quotes from one of those quote websites (you know which sites I’m talking about). Those random quotes from famous people—such as, “People who think they know.
Block Quotations: When you feel the need to include a quotation that is more than a few lines long, you should format it as a block quotation (as above). Blockquotes are usually indented half an inch from the left margin but stay flush with the right margin; they are single spaced and are often printed in a smaller font size (though not less than 10-point).
When you are making decisions about how to integrate quotations into your essay, you might imagine that you are reading the essay out loud to an audience. You would not read the parenthetical note. Without some sort of introduction, your audience would not even know that the statement about Roman antiquity was a quotation, let alone where the quotation came from.
Consider placement - Quotes are an ideal way to open a speech, or a new segment within a speech or essay, but you should generally avoid closing your essay or speech with a quote. You want the final words to come from you, whether you're reiterating the main point, closing with a hypothetical question, or just offering a final thought.
Remember, many of these mistakes are easy to make but you can still correct them by leaving yourself an extra few minutes at the end of your essay to check it through, paying special attention to your punctuation marks and remembering our punctuation rules for the correct apostrophe, quotation mark and comma use.
You use quotations to support this argument. This involves selecting, presenting, and discussing material from the text in order to “prove” your point—to make your case—in much the same way a lawyer brings evidence before a jury. Quoting for any other purpose is counterproductive.