SED Expanded Reference Guide

Short quotations (not more than forty words) should be enclosed in single quotation marks and run on with the main text.

Examples:

1. Bhabha argues that 'Mimicry is at once resemblance and menace'.¹

2. While Watt does not fully challenge the claim that Defoe is ‘our first novelist’,² Gallagher complicates the matter when she draws attention to Robinson Crusoe’s lack of two things – ‘(1) a conceptual category of fiction, and (2) believable stories that did not solicit belief’³ – that she believes are essential features of novels.

3. Looking up, Yorick perceives 'a starling hung in a little cage – "I can't get out," said the starling'.⁴

4. In Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland Alice asks herself, ‘“Do cats eat bats? Do cats eat bats?” and sometimes, “Do bats eat cats?”’.⁵

5. Seth Koven has written persuasively about the concentration of late nineteenth-century philanthropists on hygiene in homes, suggesting they were more an ‘army of social housekeepers’ rather than a spiritual army fighting to raise them to heaven.⁶

Note:

• It is good practice to make your quotations part of your sentence, as in the examples above. 
• Quotations used in this way are not required to end with punctuation – follow the rules of punctuation for your whole sentence (the comma after ‘our first novelist’ in example two is there as part of the grammar of the sentence) – except when the quotation ends with a question or exclamation mark.
• Footnote numbers should be in superscript (this is automatic when using the insert footnote tool in MS Word) and should be placed after the quotation and any punctuation, except in the case of dashes, as in example two above. Where possible it is best to place the footnote number at the end of the relevant sentence, as in example five.
• For quotations within quotations, double quotation marks should be used, as in examples three and four above.

Long quotations (forty or more words) should be broken off from the preceding and following lines of typescript. They should be indented five spaces, and single-spaced. They should not be placed within quotation marks.

Examples:

1. In his study Imagining the Penitentiary, Bender emphasises how the new prisons worked as a narrative of reformation:

the reformers aimed to reshape the life story of each criminal by measured application of pleasure and pain within a planned framework. [...] Upon entering one of the new penitentiaries, each convict would be assigned to live out a programme or scenario.⁷

This model reproduced many features of the narrative structure of the novel.

2. Dickens uses literary techniques, such as anthropomorphism and repetition, to build a scene, as can be seen in the beginning to Bleak House:

Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards, and hovering in the rigging of great ships. [...] Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck.⁸

Note:

• If any words are omitted in a quotation the omission must be marked by an ellipsis within square brackets '[...]' as in the examples above. It is not normally necessary to use an ellipsis at the beginning or end of a quotation.
• The quotation should end with a full stop – or a question mark if that was the original punctuation.
• Start a new sentence after the quotation – it is asking too much of the reader to follow a sentence over a long quotation.