Chicago style offers two systems for citing quotes: notes-bibliography and author-date. Both follow the same core rules for how you handle quoted text, but they differ in where the citation appears. This guide covers how to format short quotes, long block quotes, and place your citation markers correctly in both systems.
Two Citation Systems, One Set of Quoting Rules
The Chicago Manual of Style uses two citation systems. The notes-bibliography system, preferred in the humanities (literature, history, and the arts), places a superscript number after the quote that points to a footnote or endnote at the bottom of the page or end of the document. The author-date system, common in the sciences and social sciences, places a parenthetical reference directly in the text with the author’s last name, year of publication, and page number.
Regardless of which system you use, the rules for formatting the quoted text itself are identical. The difference is only in how and where you mark the source.
Short Quotes Run Into Your Text
When a quotation is relatively brief (under about 100 words), you run it directly into your sentence and enclose it in double quotation marks. The quoted material should read grammatically as part of your own sentence, even if that means adjusting your lead-in slightly.
In the notes-bibliography system, place the superscript note number after the closing quotation mark and after any punctuation:
- Morrison described the house as “spiteful, full of a baby’s venom.”1
In the author-date system, the parenthetical citation goes after the closing quotation mark but before the period:
- Morrison described the house as “spiteful, full of a baby’s venom” (Morrison 1987, 3).
Notice the period moves. With footnotes, the period stays inside (or right after) the quote because the superscript follows all punctuation. With author-date, the period comes after the parenthetical citation because the citation is part of the sentence.
Punctuation Placement Around Quotation Marks
Chicago follows the American convention: commas and periods go inside closing quotation marks, regardless of whether they appeared in the original source. Colons and semicolons go outside. Question marks and exclamation points go inside if they are part of the quoted material, outside if they belong to your own sentence.
For footnote numbers specifically, the Chicago Manual states that a note number follows any punctuation mark except the dash, which it precedes. So your superscript should come after a period, comma, or closing parenthesis, but before a dash. In practice, the most common placement is at the very end of the sentence, right after the period that follows the closing quotation mark.
When to Use a Block Quote
A prose quotation of five or more lines, or 100 words or more, should be set off as a block quote. For poetry, block two or more lines. The 100-word guideline is flexible. If you have a quote that is 90 words but contains several sentences, blocking it can improve readability. Conversely, a quote just over 100 words that fits naturally in your paragraph might not need to be blocked. Use your judgment, but when in doubt, follow the 100-word threshold.
How to Format a Block Quote
Block quotes follow a distinct set of formatting rules that set them apart visually from the rest of your text:
- No quotation marks. The indentation itself signals that the text is quoted, so you do not enclose it in quotation marks.
- Start a new line. A block quote always begins on its own line, separated from the text that introduces it.
- Indent the entire block. Use your word processor’s indent tool (not the tab key or space bar) to shift the left margin of the entire quoted passage. A half-inch indent is standard.
- Match the surrounding text. The Chicago Manual recommends keeping the same font and size as your body text, though some publishers use a slightly smaller font to further distinguish the block.
Your citation goes at the end of the block quote. In the notes-bibliography system, place the superscript number after the final punctuation of the quoted text. In the author-date system, place the parenthetical citation after the final punctuation, with no additional period after the closing parenthesis.
Introducing Quotes Smoothly
How you introduce a quote determines the punctuation before it. If you use a complete sentence to introduce the quote, follow it with a colon. If the quote flows naturally into your sentence structure, no special punctuation is needed beyond what grammar requires. If you introduce the quote with a phrase like “she said” or “he wrote,” a comma typically follows the introductory phrase.
One recent update in the 18th edition of the Chicago Manual: when a quotation is introduced with a dialogue verb plus a linking verb (for example, “She said that”), no comma is required before the quotation. This small change makes introductions read more naturally.
Quoting Within a Quote
When your quoted passage itself contains a quotation, use single quotation marks for the inner quote. If you are already inside a block quote (which has no quotation marks), any quoted material within the block gets standard double quotation marks, since the block format already indicates the outer level of quoting.
Using Ellipses and Brackets
When you omit words from a quoted passage, insert an ellipsis (three spaced periods) to mark the gap. If the omission falls between two complete sentences, use a period followed by the ellipsis (four dots total), with the first dot serving as the period for the preceding sentence.
When you need to change or add a word for clarity or grammatical fit, place your alteration in square brackets. For example, if the original reads “He went to the store” but your sentence requires a different pronoun, you would write “[She] went to the store.” Brackets signal to the reader that those words are yours, not the original author’s.
Footnote and Endnote Format
If you are using the notes-bibliography system, your first citation of a source in a footnote should include the full publication details: author’s full name, title, publication information in parentheses, and the page number. Subsequent citations of the same source use a shortened form with just the author’s last name, a shortened title, and the page number.
For example, a first footnote for a book might look like this:
1. Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987), 3.
A later reference to the same book:
4. Morrison, Beloved, 45.
If you cite the same source twice in a row with no intervening notes, you can use “Ibid.” followed by the new page number if it differs.
Author-Date In-Text Citation Format
In the author-date system, the in-text citation includes the author’s last name, the publication year, and the page number, all in parentheses: (Morrison 1987, 3). The full bibliographic details appear in a reference list at the end of your paper. If you mention the author’s name in your sentence, you only need the year and page in parentheses: Morrison (1987, 3) describes the house as spiteful from its very first line.
When a work has two or three authors, list all names. For four or more authors, list only the first author followed by “et al.” in the in-text citation, but include all authors in the reference list entry.
Choosing the Right System
Your instructor, publisher, or discipline will usually dictate which system to use. If you are writing a literature paper, a history thesis, or anything in the arts, the notes-bibliography system is standard. If you are writing in psychology, sociology, or the natural sciences, author-date is the norm. When no one has told you which to use, notes-bibliography is the safer default for most humanities coursework, since it is Chicago’s oldest and most flexible system and can handle unusual source types that do not fit neatly into author-date formatting.