How to properly use quotations and citations for a strong paper

To write an effective paper and avoid plagiarizing, it is important to use quotations and their citations properly; so what do these two strategies mean, and how to employ them appropriately? First, Quoting means to borrow information from books, articles, or any material written by others. Students can use two types of quotations in their papers: Direct and Indirect quotations. The first type refers to the exact words taken from an original source and written between quotation marks; while indirect quotation can be in a form of a paraphrase or summary of someone’s quotation. Second, the sources of our quotations should be mentioned in our papers. The process of noting resources is called citation. Amongst numerous styles, MLA is one the most used citation styles by students and academic researchers. This style includes two types of citation. The first are called “in-text citations”, and It is included within the body of our papers, and placed directly next to the borrowed quotations. This kind of citations should involve only brief information about the source such as the author’s name followed by the page number between parentheses or only the page number. However, this type of citations should be mentioned in details at the end of our paper; and this is called works cited: the second type of citations. Works cited is the page where full and complete citations should appear. To explain, this type of citations should include author’s name, the title, publisher, year published, page numbers, URLs, and a few other pieces of information. To conclude, the way we use quotations and citations has a significant impact of the quality and reputation of our papers; that’s why we have to implement them accurately.