How to Format a Block Quote in APA, MLA, and Chicago

Quick Answer: when and how to block a quotation

APA 7 blocks a quotation of 40 or more words. MLA 9 blocks prose that runs to more than four lines of your paper, or verse of more than three lines. Chicago 18 blocks prose of roughly 100 words or more, about eight typed lines, and any quotation of two or more paragraphs; Turabian, the student version of Chicago, uses five lines as the trigger. In every style the block starts on a new line, is indented 0.5 inch from the left margin, carries no quotation marks, and is followed by the citation after the final period. Whether the block is double- or single-spaced depends on the style and, for Chicago, on who is reading the paper.

Introducing sentence ending in a colon:

     Quoted text of 40 or more words, indented 0.5 in, double-spaced, no quotation marks, ending with its own period. (Author, Year, p. Page)

Author (Year) put it this way:

     Quoted text of 40 or more words. (p. Page)

Introducing sentence ending in a colon:

     Quoted prose of more than four lines, indented 0.5 in, double-spaced, no quotation marks. (Author Page)

Introducing sentence ending in a colon:

     Quoted prose of about 100 words or more, or two or more paragraphs, indented 0.5 in, no quotation marks.1

     Quoted prose, same layout. (Author Year, Page)

Count before you format

The threshold is the only part of the rule that changes what the page looks like, so settle it first. APA counts words. MLA counts lines as they fall in your typed paper, not in the source. Chicago gives a word count and a line count as a rule of thumb and then adds structural triggers that apply regardless of length. The same 63-word passage is therefore a block in APA, a block in MLA once it spills past four lines, and a run-in quotation in Chicago unless it contains a paragraph break or your instructor follows Turabian.

The examples below quote an invented book, Elena Farrow's The Ecology of Attention (Lantern House, 2020), and an invented poem, Ines Marlowe's "Harbor Light," so that one passage can be shown in all three styles.

APA 7: 40 words, half an inch, citation after the period

Section 8.27 of the Publication Manual sets the APA form. Start the quotation on a new line and indent the whole block 0.5 in from the left margin, the same distance as a paragraph indent. Keep the block double-spaced like the rest of the paper. Do not add quotation marks. If the quotation has more than one paragraph, indent the first line of each paragraph after the first an additional 0.5 in. Then place the citation after the final punctuation of the block, with no period after the closing parenthesis. The APA quotations page shows both citation forms.

Farrow rejects the idea that focus can be commanded:

     Attention is not a resource that a classroom can simply demand. It is trained by the environment, by the pace of the day, and by the number of competing signals a student has already absorbed before the lesson begins. A teacher who ignores that history is asking for a capacity the room has already spent, and no amount of insistence will refund it. (Farrow, 2020, p. 63)

Narrative citation: name and year before, page after

If the author and year appear in the sentence that introduces the block, do not repeat them afterwards. Only the page number goes in parentheses after the final punctuation. That is the same parenthetical versus narrative split that applies to short quotations; the block merely moves the locator to the end.

Farrow (2020) rejects the idea that focus can be commanded:

     Attention is not a resource that a classroom can simply demand. It is trained by the environment, by the pace of the day, and by the number of competing signals a student has already absorbed before the lesson begins. A teacher who ignores that history is asking for a capacity the room has already spent, and no amount of insistence will refund it. (p. 63)

Sources without page numbers

A block quotation from a webpage, an e-book without fixed pages, or a transcript still needs a locator. APA's no page numbers rule accepts a paragraph number, a heading or section name, a heading plus a paragraph count, or a timestamp for audiovisual works. Chapter numbers are allowed for e-books: (Farrow, 2020, Chapter 3, para. 4). Do not invent page numbers from a PDF viewer's counter.

MLA 9: four lines of prose, three of verse

MLA measures the quotation in the lines of your own paper. Prose that would occupy more than four lines is blocked; verse of more than three lines is blocked. Indent the block 0.5 in from the left margin, keep it double-spaced, and do not add quotation marks. The Style Center adds that every block in the paper should be indented the same amount, even when it follows a one-line introduction. The parenthetical citation goes after the final punctuation, with no period after it; the Style Center explains why the logic differs from run-in quotations. MLA has no year in the citation, so the author-page form is all you add.

Farrow rejects the idea that focus can be commanded:

     Attention is not a resource that a classroom can simply demand. It is trained by the environment, by the pace of the day, and by the number of competing signals a student has already absorbed before the lesson begins. A teacher who ignores that history is asking for a capacity the room has already spent, and no amount of insistence will refund it. (63)

Verse: keep the line breaks

Up to three lines of poetry stay in your sentence, separated by a slash with a space on each side, and a double slash marks a stanza break. From the fourth line, block the quotation and reproduce the poem's own line breaks and, as far as you can, its indentation. Cite by line number rather than page, writing line or lines in the first citation so the reader knows the numbers are not pages; later citations can give the numbers alone. If the parenthetical does not fit on the last line of verse, put it on the next line, flush with the right margin. The Style Center covers eliding lines and punctuating quoted poetry in detail.

The poem opens on refusal and ends on return:

     The tide keeps no appointment with the pier,
     yet every hull that leans against the dark
     is lifted, unasked, an inch toward the year
     and set down where the morning left its mark. (Marlowe, lines 1–4)

More than one paragraph

When a block quotation contains a paragraph break, MLA indents the first line of each paragraph after the first an additional 0.25 in. The first line of the block itself is never indented further, even if it began a paragraph in the source. The Style Center confirms that the extra indent applies even when the source marks paragraphs with blank lines instead of indents. Dialogue between two or more speakers is blocked the same way, with each speaker's turn starting a new indented paragraph.

Chicago 18: about 100 words, or two paragraphs

Chapter 12 of The Chicago Manual of Style treats the block as a judgement call guided by length. Its rule of thumb is that prose of a hundred words or more, roughly eight lines, should be blocked, and that anything of two or more paragraphs, a quoted letter with its salutation, or a list should be blocked whatever its length. Shorter quotations are run in. Turabian, which most students follow for Chicago papers, hardens the rule to five or more lines. Either way the block is indented 0.5 in from the left margin, takes no quotation marks, and is cited after its final punctuation: by a superscript note number in notes-bibliography style, or by an author-date parenthetical in author-date style.

Farrow rejects the idea that focus can be commanded:

     Attention is not a resource that a classroom can simply demand. It is trained by the environment, by the pace of the day, and by the number of competing signals a student has already absorbed before the lesson begins.
          A teacher who ignores that history is asking for a capacity the room has already spent, and no amount of insistence will refund it.1

     . . . and no amount of insistence will refund it. (Farrow 2020, 63–64)

When the source has already been identified in a note or in the sentence that introduces the block, notes-bibliography style also allows a bare page reference in parentheses after the block, (64), instead of another note number. The first line of a Chicago block is not indented further; paragraphs after the first are marked by an extra first-line indent, as above, or by a blank line between paragraphs. Pick one method and keep it.

Single- or double-spaced?

This is where Chicago papers differ from APA and MLA papers. Turabian single-spaces block quotations and leaves a blank line before and after the block, so a student paper following Turabian shows the quotation as a visibly denser paragraph. A manuscript prepared for a publisher follows CMOS chapter 2 and the publisher's own instructions, which usually means double-spacing throughout so that editors can mark the text. If an instructor says to double-space everything, that instruction wins. What does not change is the indent, the missing quotation marks, and the citation after the final punctuation.

Verse in Chicago

Two or more lines of poetry are normally blocked, with the poem's own line breaks and indentation preserved; the block is either indented like prose or, in typeset work, centered on its longest line. A single line, or two lines you deliberately want inside the sentence, can be run in with a slash surrounded by spaces. Cite line numbers only when the edition prints them; otherwise cite the page. An omitted line inside a blocked poem is shown by a row of spaced periods roughly as long as a line of the poem.

     The tide keeps no appointment with the pier,
     yet every hull that leans against the dark
     is lifted, unasked, an inch toward the year
     and set down where the morning left its mark.3

Introducing the block: colon, comma, or nothing

The punctuation before a block quotation is decided by grammar, not by the style manual, and the three styles agree. A complete sentence that announces the quotation ends in a colon. An introduction that flows grammatically into the quoted words takes a comma after a verb of saying, or no punctuation at all when the quotation completes your own clause. Do not put a colon after that or argues that; the clause is unfinished and the colon breaks it.

When the quotation continues your clause, APA and Chicago let you change the first letter of the quoted text to lowercase without brackets. Every other change to the wording has to be marked, which is what the next section covers.

Omitting and changing words

Long quotations are where writers most often cut. All three styles mark an omission inside a quotation with an ellipsis and mark an insertion with square brackets. The differences are in how the ellipsis is typed and how a dropped sentence boundary is shown. APA's changes to quotations page and the MLA Style Center's styling ellipses post are the authorities for the first two; Chicago's rules are in chapter 12.

Quotation marks inside a block quotation

Because the block has no quotation marks of its own, anything the source itself put in quotation marks keeps double quotation marks inside the block. This is the reverse of a run-in quotation, where the inner quotation drops to single marks. All three styles follow the same logic, and it is the rule most often broken by writers who convert a run-in quotation into a block without re-checking the inner marks. The quotation mark converter switches a passage between the two forms.

Farrow (2020) reports the phrase that shaped her study:

     One veteran teacher called the first period "the borrowed hour" and planned around it. She did not expect attention before nine; she expected to earn it by ten, and she built the lesson so that the earning was visible to the students who were doing it. (p. 65)

Side-by-side summary

Common mistakes

• Wrapping the block in quotation marks. The indent is the signal; the marks are redundant and wrong in all three styles.
• Putting the citation before the final period, as you would for a run-in quotation. After a block the period comes first and the parenthesis or note number follows it.
• Adding a period after the closing parenthesis. (Farrow, 2020, p. 63). is a common error; nothing follows the parenthesis.
• Blocking a 35-word APA quotation because it looks long, or running in a 45-word one because it looks short. APA counts words, so count them.
• Measuring MLA's four lines in the source instead of in your own paper.
• Blocking every long quotation in a Chicago paper and never checking whether the instructor follows Turabian's five-line rule or CMOS's hundred-word rule of thumb.
• Indenting the first line of the block an extra amount, as if it were a paragraph. Only the second and later paragraphs get the extra indent.
• Leaving single quotation marks inside a block that was pasted from a run-in draft.
• Using the word processor's unspaced ellipsis in MLA, which wants three spaced periods.
• Starting a block quotation with an ellipsis. Begin at the first word you keep; readers know a quotation is an excerpt.
• Forgetting that a block quotation is still a quotation: it needs a locator, and it needs an entry in the reference list, works-cited list, or bibliography.

Related guides and official manuals

• Paraphrasing vs. Quoting
• How to Cite the Same Source Multiple Times
• How to Cite a Poem in MLA
• How to Avoid Plagiarism
• APA in-text citations
• MLA in-text citations
• Chicago in-text citations and notes
• APA Style: quotations
• APA Style: changes to quotations
• APA Style: quotations without page numbers
• MLA Style Center: how to indent block quotations
• MLA Style Center: paragraphs in block quotations
• MLA Style Center: styling ellipses
• MLA Style Center: formatting your research project
• Chicago Notes-Bibliography citation guide
• Chicago Author-Date citation guide