Answer:
A; an exact copy of the author's words
Step-by-step explanation:
Concepts:
- A quotation is a collection of words taken from a text or speech and stated again by someone other than the original author/speaker. You must put quotation marks (") around the text that you've copied from the original person to express quotations.
- Example: "To live without Hope is to Cease to live." - Fyodor Dostoevsky, Russian Novelist
Solution:
Let's go through each definition in the answer choices and see which one best fits with our definition of a quote.
A; An exact copy of the author's words: A is correct because in our definition, it states that a quotation is a bunch of words taken from the original author/speaker that's repeated again. Quotations are exact copies from what the genuine author/speaker said.
B; a shorter version of the author's words: B is incorrect because a shorter version of the author's words isn't necessarily copying everything they said, word by word, and putting quotation marks around. Let's take this for example: "The soul is healed by being with children." - Fyodor Dostoevsky. If I were to remove some parts of it, let's say I'd end up with this: "The soul is healed" - Fyodor Dostoevsky. As you can see, it's not an exact copy from what the original author said, so B cannot be correct.
C; a summary of the author's words: C is incorrect, because as it explicitly said, it's a summary of what the author/speaker stated. A summary is a set of statements for the main points of an article, speech, book, etc. You could write a summary about Crime and Punishment (novel) and include some quotations in there, but majority of it will be written by yourself, not the author.
D; a translation of the author's words: D is incorrect because that's known as literal translation. Literal translation occurs when there's a part of the text being translated word by word without looking at how they're used as a phrase, sentence, etc.