In our most recent "how can we help you?" thread, a reader asks:

Sometimes when I quote a passage from another philosopher, I'd like to remove a paragraph break without removing any words. How does one indicate this? I feel like both using and not using an ellipsis would be misleading.

Hmm…whenever I block quote long passages, I always leave in a paragraph break. But in cases where I'm merely quoting within the regular body text, I guess I think separating the relevant passages sort of "[like]" I am "[doing here]" is the way to go (as putting in an ellipsis sort of suggests a continuity of passages to me that doesn't exist across passages in different paragraphs. But maybe I'm overthinking things.

What do readers think?

Posted in

7 responses to “Properly quoting material involving paragraph breaks?”

  1. Michel

    If it’s a block quote, I’d say bite the bullet and reproduce the break.
    If it’s just in-text… I don’t know. I guess I’m not sure that the paragraph break matters in that case, but I’m not confident in my intuition. Marcus’s suggestion seems like a good compromise.

  2. Chicago Manual of Style 16th Edition in sections 13.20 and 13.30 says quotes should preserve paragraph breaks via indentation or extra line spacing between each paragraph (in blockquotes) or via preserving the existing spacing and putting quotation marks at the beginning of each paragraph and at the end of the last paragraph (in normal quotes). Different style guides may have different suggestions.
    If you are writing for a venue that does not specify a style my own view is that you can either remove it wordlessly (although maybe I betray my corrupt typographic loyalties by saying this) or indicate in your citation that you have removed a paragraph break (as you would indicate that you’ve removed citations or italics or whatever). This is just me inventing stuff whole cloth, though.

  3. Cap

    For readability, to avoid clumsy prose, I would just quote the passage as though there isn’t a paragraph break, though I think it undeniable that this is not 100% perfect scholarship. Still, it wouldn’t be the worst thing I’ve done today.

  4. Matty Silverstein

    Paragraph breaks are a form of punctuation. The norms for reproducing other aspects of punctuation are applicable to paragraph breaks as well.

  5. I hereby grant you permission to quote me with paragraph breaks omitted (as long as you spell my name right).

  6. Alma

    @ Christopher Hitchcock I know you are just being playful but it isn’t up to authors to grant permission to do this. It’s something you owe to readers, not authors.

  7. Indicating a paragraph break within a quoted passage where (for whatever reason) the author does not want to include the actual line break(s) is the job of the pilcrow, ¶.
    https://sdap.org/wp-content/uploads/downloads/Style-Manual.pdf#page=157

Leave a Reply

Discover more from The Philosophers' Cocoon

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading