Skip to content
Citation mechanics

Block quotation

Also called: block quote, extract, display quotation

A long quotation set off from the body text as its own indented paragraph, without quotation marks.

Past a length threshold, a quotation stops being inline and becomes a block: indented, no quotation marks (the indentation does that job), and with the citation after the closing punctuation rather than before it.

The thresholds differ. APA 7 blocks at 40 words or more, indented half an inch, double-spaced. MLA 9 blocks at more than four lines of prose or three lines of verse. Chicago is looser and advises blocking at roughly five lines or 100 words.

Block quotations are heavily over-used. A block signals “this wording is the evidence” — if what matters is the finding rather than the phrasing, paraphrase instead.

Do it on CitationEasy

See also

More in citation mechanics

All 95 glossary terms · Free citation generator