For various reasons, you may feel compelled to throw in a lot of quotations in your technical documents. It's true: direct quotation can provide authority to your documents, but so can paraphrasing and summarizing (covered below).

However you use your borrowed information—whether directly quoting, paraphrasing, or summarizing—remember that you must cite your sources. That's called documenting your sources of borrowed information. That is covered in documentation.

Reasons for Direct Quotations

In technical texts, you can reduce your reasons for direct quotations to these:

Authority speaks:

According to Stephen Hawking in an interview with Nature, "There is no escape from a black hole in classical theory, Quantum theory, however, enables energy and information to escape from a black hole."

Dr. Avijit Banerjee, chair of cariology and operative dentistry at King's College London, said "the potential harmful effects of fluoride cited have not been associated with the very low levels of fluoride used in water fluoridation programs."

Avoid guilt by association: Imagine that some politician makes hopelessly misinformed comments about vaccines. You don't want readers to think that you have that idea about vaccines so you quote the politician, perhaps loading the attribution:

In his presidential campaign, he has put forth the widely discredited notion that fluoridated water is "associated with arthritis, bone fractures, bone cancer, IQ loss, neurodevelopmental disorders, and thyroid disease."

Perfect expression:

Crazy, quirky expression:

In Into a Black Hole transcribed by https://www.hawking.org.uk/, Hawking stated that "black holes ain't as black as they are painted."

Methods of Direct Quotation

Block direct quotation

According to APA style:

Format quotations of 40 words or more as block quotations.
Do not use quotation marks to enclose a block quotation.
Start a block quotation on a new line and indent the whole block 0.5 in. from the left margin.
Either
(a) cite the source in parentheses after the quotation's final punctuation or
(b) cite the author and year in the narrative before the quotation and place only the page number in parentheses after the quotation's final punctuation.

Researchers have studied how people talk to themselves:

Inner speech is a paradoxical phenomenon. It is an experience that is central to many people's everyday lives, and yet it presents considerable challenges to any effort to study it scientifically. Nevertheless, a wide range of methodologies and approaches have combined to shed light on the subjective experience of inner speech and its cognitive and neural underpinnings. (Alderson-Day & Fernyhough, 2015, p. 957)

narrative citation: ...neural underpinnings. (Alderson-Day & Fernyhough, 2015, p. 957)
parenthetical citation: ...It is an experience that is central to many people's everyday lives (2015)
Source: https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/citations/quotations#:~:text=Block%20quotation%20with%20narrative%20citation,311)

Complete-sentence direct quotation

If you need to quote a complete sentence, remember to attach some sort of attribution to it, and use appropriate punction:

Colon: Research from the Encyclopedia Britannica states that distance learning was not universally accepted by colleges and universities across the United States: "the introduction of distance learning in traditional institutions raised fears that technology will someday completely eliminate real classrooms and human instructors” based on research from the Encyclopedia Britannica" [3].

Comma: According to the United States Distance Learning Association, "in 2015, an estimated quarter of a million people were participating in some level of undergraduate distance learning in the United States alone" [2].

See the next section on attribution

Run-in direct quotation

In plenty of instances, it's better to run in parts of a direct quotation to the syntax of your own writing, for example:

Dewey stated that "by 1987, for example, the interest in distance learning was sufficient to create the United States Distance Learning Association (USDAL)" [2].

Another advantage of online learning is that it more readily enables "adaptation of training materials that address students' individual needs" [1].

Direct Quotations: Attribution

An attribution for a quotation indicates who made the quoted statement and possibly other such details. The atribution is highlighted in red:

Dewey also argues that “this shift has significant implications and allows distance educators to play an important role in the fulfillment of the promise of the right to universal education” [2].

In this first example, the unattributed quotations are highlighted in red (using bracketed-format for citations):

Technology changed the game of distance learning entirely. Just a few of the technologies that are commonly used in distance learning courses include video chat, webinars, chat room digital forums and e-mail based on details from the Essential Guide [1] and are the foundation of virtual classrooms. "By 1987, for example, the interest in distance learning was sufficient to create the United States Distance Learning Association (USDAL)" [2]. And as technology has continued to improve, access to computers and internet in most homes, as well as high speed cellular connections, the growth and interest in distance learning in many forms has skyrocketed. "In 2015, an estimated quarter of a million people were participating in some level of undergraduate distance learning in the United States alone" [2]. While this number may seem like distance learning was accepted by colleges and universities across the United States, "the introduction of distance learning in traditional institutions raised fears that technology will someday completely eliminate real classrooms and human instructors" [3]. Because of this unrealistic fear, many colleges and universities still offered limited or no remote or online course options even as recent as five years ago. But the major driver that brought distance learning into the mainstream and helped to solidify this education method as just as valuable as a regular classroom model was the COVID pandemic.

The bracketed numbers in the above example identify the sources of the quotations. But that is inadequate. In this revision, attributions have been added and are highlighted in blue:

Technology changed the game of distance learning entirely. Just a few of the technologies that are commonly used in distance learning courses include video chat, webinars, chat room digital forums and e-mail based on details from the Essential Guide [1] and are the foundation of virtual classrooms. Dewey states that "by 1987, for example, the interest in distance learning was sufficient to create the United States Distance Learning Association (USDAL)" [2]. And as technology has continued to improve, access to computers and internet in most homes, as well as high speed cellular connections, the growth and interest in distance learning in many forms has skyrocketed. According to the United States Distance Learning Association, "in 2015, an estimated quarter of a million people were participating in some level of undergraduate distance learning in the United States alone" [2]. While this number may seem like distance learning was accepted by colleges and universities across the United States, research presented in the Encyclopedia Britannica states that "the introduction of distance learning in traditional institutions raised fears that technology will someday completely eliminate real classrooms and human instructors" [3]. Because of this unrealistic fear, many colleges and universities still offered limited or no remote or online course options even as recent as five years ago. But the major driver that brought distance learning into the mainstream and helped to solidify this education method as just as valuable as a regular classroom model was the COVID pandemic.

Alternatives to Direct Quotation

See Paraphrasing

See Summarizing


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