What is a quotation?
‘A passage quoted from a book, speech, etc’ (Oxford English Dictionary 2007). Before using quotations you should check the guidelines for use in your faculty or department. It is generally not considered to be good writing practice to over-use quotations, as it does not demonstrate understanding or synthesis of the literature being cited. Where they occur, quotations should be verbatim with regard to the original, including italics, punctuation etc. Even spelling or punctuation mistakes should be retained. It can be tempting to correct mistakes when reproducing a quotation, but you should refrain from doing this and use the term “sic”, usually italicised and placed in square brackets thus [sic]. For example: Jones (2007, p.45) states that “both Davies (1998) and Stevens (2005) agree on the efficacy of the suspendedsion [sic] model to handle this experiment.” If the quotation is less than one sentence in length it should appear within quotation marks, as in the example above. Also, your
