Short quotes from websites

A student asked me how to quote from a webpage, specifically to use a short quote to define a term from a government website, specifically:

Volunteer work is defined as ‘non-compulsory, unpaid work performed for others outside a person’s own household or family business’ (New Zealand Parliamentary Service, 2018). 

To teach them how to start the citation process, I suggested that we initially turning to the APA bible, the Publication Manual (2019), to see what that says. From a quick scout in the index, the manual leads us to section 8.26, explaining that for a short quote (i.e., fewer than 40 words), we should:

"enclose [our chosen text] within double quotation marks" and "include a full citation [...] in the same sentence as the quotation" occurs (American Psychological Association, 2019, p. 271).

We compete the quote by adding a parenthetical citation at the end of our quote, to show our source, exactly as I have done above, including a page number, because it comes from a specific location in the document, and our citations should provide a map back to the source (American Psychological Association, 2019). However, online there are no page numbers. We can point someone back to the specific page, but a page might be 30,000 words long. The full stop comes at the end of the citation, which contains the page number, after the close bracket. We also need to check carefully that our quotation is EXACTLY as the author wrote it. If we make any changes, we show where we have done so by using square brackets to frame our trimmings.

We know we need to use double quotes for our Parliamentary Service quote. We can see it is a short quote, under 40 words. We have an author name, and a year. But when quoting from an online source, there are no page numbers. One page might be 30,000 words long. How do we quote then? How can we point someone back to the exact source? 

The APA manual guides us here as well, in section 8.28. For a quote from a web page, we simply add one of the following page location markers:

• A section heading: ....2018, [] section, ...
• A paragraph number: ...2018, para. [], ...
• Both

In this instance the item is a long way down the page. I would include both, thus we would end up with:

Volunteer work has been defined as "non-compulsory, unpaid work performed for others outside a person’s own household or family business" (New Zealand Parliamentary Service, 2018, H Topic of the month section, para. 1).

I think the clarifying aim has to be providing the reader with good quality information. If we are quoting from a short webpage, I would leave off the additional page location details. If it is a long page, use sections or paragraph numbers. 

Think of what works best for the reader, and for reading.

Sam

References:

American Psychological Association (2019). Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association: The official guide to APA style (7th ed.). Author.

New Zealand Parliamentary Service. (11 October 2018). Monthly Economic Review: October 2018. https://www.parliament.nz/en/pb/library-research-papers/monthly-economic-review/monthly-economic-review-october-2018/