Final answer:
Quotation marks are used to enclose the exact words of a speaker or writer. It is crucial to maintain accuracy and avoid plagiarism by properly attributing and formatting quotations, using ellipses for omissions, and brackets for alterations.
Step-by-step explanation:
The exact words of a speaker or writer should be enclosed by quotation marks.
Quotations are a crucial element in English writing. They are used when incorporating someone else's words verbatim into your text. It is vital to ensure that the quoted text is identical to the source, to maintain the integrity and accuracy of the borrowed material. It is also important to enclose the quotation with quotation marks to demarcate where the author's original words start and finish within your writing. This practice helps you avoid plagiarism and it is important to provide proper attribution to the source.
When quoting, it's possible that you may need to omit a part of the quote for brevity, which should be indicated with an ellipsis (three dots for an omission within a sentence, and four dots to indicate a complete sentence is being omitted). If any alterations are made to fit the quote into the context of your writing, such as changes in tense or the addition of a word for clarity, you must use square brackets to make the alteration clear to the reader.
For longer quotes, known as block quotes, a different format is used without quotation marks, typically indenting the entire block of text. Lastly, when a quote contains another quote, use single quotation marks for the inner quotation. This maintains the readability and clarity of the nested quotations.