Seamlessly Integrating Block Quotations in Literary and Cultural Analysis

The block quotation is one of the primary instruments of literary and cultural analysis, and its handling in MLA style is more technically specific, and more important to the argument, than many scholarly authors realize.

Done well, a block quotation puts evidence before the reader that is large enough to be read in full: source text the reader has to encounter directly, because the argument depends on specific features of the language, the structure, or the texture of the original that a summary would lose. Done poorly, it fills space with someone else's words while the author's argument waits on the other side.

The technical requirements in MLA 9th. A prose quotation of more than four lines is formatted as a block quotation. A verse quotation of more than three lines is formatted as a block. Block quotations are indented one-half inch from the left margin — the same indentation as a new paragraph — with no additional indentation for the first line and no quotation marks around the quoted text. The quotation marks are dropped because the indentation itself signals that the material is quoted. The parenthetical citation follows the closing punctuation of the block, not before it. That is the opposite of the placement rule for inline quotations, and writers confuse the two reliably.

The line between prose and verse. Verse quotations of three lines or fewer are integrated into the text with a slash (/) indicating line breaks. Verse quotations of four lines or more are formatted as blocks, with the original line breaks preserved. Two errors follow from mixing these up: formatting short verse quotations as blocks when they do not meet the threshold, and using slashes in block verse quotations where the original line breaks should appear. An MLA-trained reader will notice either one immediately.

The argumentative requirement. Every block quotation requires what is sometimes called a "sandwich" structure: an introduction that frames the quotation and tells the reader what to look for in it, the quotation itself, and an analysis that follows the quotation and does the interpretive work. The analysis is required. A block quotation followed immediately by the next paragraph, or by a transitional sentence that moves on without engaging the quoted text, is a structural error as well as a stylistic one. The quotation has been placed in the argument without being integrated into it.

The selection question. The block quotation should be exactly as long as it needs to be to support the argument and no longer. Authors who block-quote entire stanzas or paragraphs when two or three lines would serve the point are using the form to avoid the work of selection, the close reading that identifies which specific elements of the source text the argument actually depends on. Shorter, more precisely selected quotations, with MLA ellipsis conventions applied correctly to indicate omissions, typically make stronger arguments than longer ones.