Hi Yamile,

No, the capitalization at the start of a quotation can vary according to its context. So for example, if a quote starts in the middle of your sentence, you can lowercase the first word even if it was capitalized in the original. You don’t need to mark changes like this with square brackets; APA states that they’re minor enough to require no explanation.

Thanks

Usually, it’s best to try to find the original article and cite that directly. But if you’re unable to access that article, you can use the phrase “as cited in” to cite it indirectly, as explained here.

I would usually suggest just citing the quote with its original formatting (i.e. without adding the line break); APA doesn’t provide any guidance for making this sort of change to a quotation. But if you feel it’s essential to do so, the best option may be to indicate the change in square brackets at the end, e.g.:

“1) apple,
2) banana [formatting adjusted from original]”

Regarding bold or italic from the original, you can indicate that you haven’t added this yourself by clarifying in square brackets, e.g. “this was the only effective method [italics in original]” (p. 15).

Hi Jack,

thank you for your answer.

Regarding 1): In the original, the enumeration is without line breaks, e.g. “1) apple, 2) banana” and I want to cite it with line breaks, e.g.:
“1) apple,
2) banana”

Also another question, that came to my mind: If the original has highlighting, e.g. bold or italic, how do I indicate that I have not adopted this in the direct quote?

Hi,

To address your questions:

1) I’m not really clear on what you mean by this. If you just mean that the quote runs over onto a second line in your text, that’s fine; you don’t have to do anything special with the quote in that case. Otherwise, I’m not sure why you would need to manually split the quote into two lines. Maybe you can clarify what you mean here?

2) When there’s a hyphenated line break in the original text, you should not replicate it; write “quotation,” not “quo-tation.”

3) It’s usually best to cite the version of a paper you used to avoid problems like this. I would advise not worrying about including the journal information if this isn’t the version you used; if you feel it’s essential, you could perhaps add it in parentheses at the end of your citation, e.g. “(Also published in . . .)” But this is not standard, and generally the guidelines are to cite the version of a paper you actually used. Alternatively, you could try to gain access to the journal version through your institution (e.g. through the library database), if possible, and then cite that version, with the correct page numbers.

I do still have some questions regarding direct quotation:

1 ) How do I quote when I want to add line breaks inside the quote, so the quote writes in one line while I want to separate the quote into two lines?

2 ) Conversely, how do I quote when there is a line break within a word in the original text? Do I have to take over the hyphenation then? So is it “quotation” or “quo-tation” then?

3) Some authors offer a free version of their paper which differs in the page numbers. I would like to have the journal in my reference entry to show that I used high quality papers but it looks confusing when the paper range is e.g. from page 14-30 and I directly cite page 2. What should I do in such a case (e.g. use different locators than the page number)?

Thanks a lot :)

Hi Nicholas,

No, quotations should never be in italics. They are marked as quotations by the use of quotation marks (or in the case of a block quote, by being indented). Italics are not needed, regardless of where you’re quoting from.