How to Cite Play Dialogue in an Essay

Academic papers that use play dialogue should follow the Modern Language Association -- or MLA -- style for formatting. When citing and formatting the dialogue, determine whether the play you are citing is a verse play or a prose play. Verse plays follow poetry citation guidelines, and prose plays follow normal prose guidelines. Verse plays are cited by placing the title, act, scene and line number of the dialogue within parentheses. Whereas prose plays are cited by placing the author’s last name and the page number of the dialogue within parentheses. If the author’s name is mentioned in the text, you can include a parenthetical citation, in which you cite a number that correlates the full citation in a bibliography. How you format the dialogue will depend on how many characters you are quoting and the length of the excerpt.

Instructions

    • 1

      Integrate the dialogue into your essay text, if you are quoting a single character in a play and the dialogue is less than four lines long. Place double quotation marks around the dialogue and cite a prose citation after the second quotation mark. Place all punctuation after the citation except for exclamation marks and question marks; place these within the quotation marks.

    • 2

      Create a block quotation for more than four lines of dialogue, from a single character. Create a new paragraph that is indented 1 inch from the left margin of the page. Don’t include quotation marks, and put your prose citation after the final punctuation mark of the quote.

    • 3

      Follow block quotation guidelines, if you are quoting dialogue with multiple characters. When the dialogue switches to a different character, begin a new line that is indented 1 inch from the left margin. Place a prose citation after the last line of dialogue.

    • 4

      Follow poetry quotation guidelines if you are citing a single line of verse. Integrate the dialogue into your text, and place double quotation marks around the line of verse. Place a verse citation immediately after the second quotation mark.

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