Hi Monique,

Yes, you can generally present dialogue from film and television in the same format as you would dialogue from a play. If you’re just quoting shorter snippets of dialogue rather than a whole exchange, you can also just quote in the normal way, e.g., When Character x says “quote,” Character y replies “quote.”

Hi Holly,

In that case, you would just have to use the information you had, so just the act number. For example, (Shakespeare, act 1).

Hi Kjirsten,

No, you don’t need to indent the text following a block quotation unless you intend it to act as a new paragraph (i.e., if you would have started a new paragraph at that point anyway). Normally, the text following the block quotation is written without any special indent, as it’s just a continuation of the paragraph from before the quotation.

Hi Ariel,

When your quotation only includes one speaker, rather than a dialogue between two or more speakers, you can usually just integrate it in the same way as you would a quote from any prose text. For example:

Duncan replies, “What he hath lost noble Macbeth hath won” (Shakespeare 1.2.95).

Hi Samuel,

We’ve recently updated these articles to reflect new information from the 9th edition of MLA. But if you’re told to use the 8th edition, don’t worry—the rules are the same, the 9th edition just provides some additional information and examples, so the information here is still accurate to the 8th edition too.

Thank you.