quotation??

Question

how would u write this line if youre quoting it.

I never knew what pretense Salem was, I never knew the lying lessons. . . .

this was a line from the character in the play.

would you write it like this??

" 'I never knew what pretense Salem was, I never knew the lying lessons. . . .' "

umm she said this line. in the play.

Answer 1

<>The double quotations (" '...' ") would only be used if a character were quoting. For instance:
Alice quoted Shakespeare " 'To be or not to be, that is the question.' "
If YOU are making the quote, just one set of marks is needed:
"I never knew what pretense Salem was, I never knew the lying lessons. . . ."

Answer 2

If you were quoting it in a paper?

Let me give you a user-friendly explanation of MLA formatting for quotations. I'm sorry, this will only be accurate if you're in America, so all I can hope is that I am correct in my assumption that only American high school students are commonly forced to read The Crucible.

In your paper, you will write something along the lines of:

In the play, The Crucible, Abagail Williams states, "I never knew what pretense Salem was, I never knew the lying lessons..." (Miller 12).

In this example, the parenthetical citation contains the author's last name and the page number on which the line was found. Notice that the ellipsis (three periods) is inside the quotation mark, signifying that the sentence continues beyond where you finished quoting it. Were it a complete sentence, you'd put a comma instead of the ellipsis. The parenthetical citation is outside of the quotation mark, and the period at the end of the sentence comes after the citation.

Sometimes in plays you will use act, scene, and line numbers instead of the page number, and in that case it would look like:

..." (Miller 1.2.35). which would mean act one, scene two, line 35.

Of course, all of the numbers in my examples are arbitrary.

Also make sure to remember that you only need to write the author's last name once, for the first parenthetical citation, and that after that just put the page number or scene and line number, whichever you choose to use. I think the page number would work better for the crucible, but I'm not sure on that protocol.

If you mention Arthur Miller in your sentence already, you don't need to put the last name in the citation:

Arthur Miller writes Abagail's anguish, "I never knew..." (12).

Last, if you integrate the quotation directly into the sentence, you don't offset the quotation with a comma at the beginning:

Unfortunately, Abagail Williams "never knew what pretense Salem was, ... never knew the lying lessons," (12).

I think this is a more in-depth answer than you were looking for, but I can guarantee everything in it will come in useful eventually.

-Meg

Answer 3

"I never knew the pretense of Salem, nor shall I ever know the lying of its lessons...

Answer 4

If you're asking what I think you're asking, only one set of quotation marks is needed. (the doubles " ", not the singles). The only time you use ' ' is a quote within a quote (like writing dialog, where one character is quoting someone else).