Question

@jagatuba I know when I had to write a paper using MLA, my professor allowed me to quote two sentences (or portions of them) that were close together and had related ideas by putting them in the same quote and putting an ellipsis (...) where I left out some words or sentences. Is that still permissible with the APA style?

Answer 1

Someone said you were the best at APA stuff...

Answer 2

I am also curious to know if I can use brackets to change capitalization within a quote to fit my sentence or to adda word to complete understanding with in a quote. Ex. [T]he dog walked over to [the girl]...

Answer 3

Yes it is. I've done it many times, but yes the material needs to be related and fairly close together. Ideally in the same paragraph, but further apart can work as long as the material is closely enough related AND it ALL supports the point you are trying to make in YOUR paragraph.

Avoid using bracket in that way. Instead try to introduse the phrase you are quoting:
Smith (2011) said, "the dog walked over to [the girl]" (p. 4).
The brackets around the words 'the girl indicate that those words are added by you and are not in the original quote and this is proper usage, but avoid changing capitalization at all. If the quote in the example we are using were a full and capitalized sentence from the source write it as follows:
Smith (2011) said, "The dog walked over to [the girl]" (p. 4).
OR
"The dog walked over to [the girl]" (Smith, 2011, p. 4).

If there is improper capitalization do it like this:
Smith (2011) said, "the dog Walked [sic] over to [the girl]" (p. 4).

Answer 4

Thank you very much, that is all good to know. I wanted to ask you my other question from earlier (which I did get a response to, but the person who answered was unsure if it was the correct answer). I am writing a paper in APA style. I want to quote a sentence from a journal that itself is a paraphrase of two other papers. I am wondering if I can just quote the paraphrase and just cite the paper I took it from or if I am required to cite the original sources and how to do that?

Answer 5

Yes that is how you do it. Cite the source that YOU got it from. This applies to quoted material as well. However, when I quote a quote I usually signal it something like this:

Johnson (2003) quotes Smith stating, "the dog walked over to [the girl] [sic]" (para. 5).
Note: here [sic] is being used to indicated that "[the girl]" is just as it appears in the quote and the those words were not added by you.

Answer 6

Thanks again! I'm glad you know your APA. :)