Blog Exercises: Quoting and Blockquotes

In “Copyright: How to Quote and Cite Sources,” I explain all the details you need to know about how to quote and cite other sources. Let’s review for this Blog Exercise.

According to International Copyright Law, you are allowed to quote from original sources without violating copyright law if you copy content in accordance with the copyright owner’s copyright policy and provide proper citation under Copyright Fair Use. If they haven’t specified their limits for Fair Use, consider using my guideline of no more than 400 words or 10% of the article to be safe.

The content must clearly indicate that it is not your words or images. It must have a link to the original source before or immediately after the quoted material, or within a blockquote.

Short quotes may be featured with quote marks, similar to quotes found in books, newspapers, and articles.

For longer quotes or to visually highlight the quote, the <blockquote> HTML tag is used to surround the quoted material. It is typically designed to look different from the rest of the text as in this statement on copyright and plagiarism by Jonathan Bailey of Plagiarism Today in “The Challenge Faced by Photographers.”

Every type of content creator faces serious challenges these days.

Writers are plagiarized, spammed and scraped constantly online while the fledgling eBook market faces serious piracy challenges. Filmmakers face obvious piracy issues and are having to depend heavily on box office revenues due to a shrinking DVD market. The music industry’s downfall is well-documented as piracy and a shift to digital has deeply cut into sales. Despite recent gains, music sales are still down considerably from just ten years ago.

No matter what copyright industry you look at, the Internet has provided both great opportunities and severe challenges.

However, the one type of artist that’s often widely overlooked is the one group that may have the biggest challenge (and opportunity) of all: Photographers

The challenge photographers face isn’t just one of piracy or people trying to get work for free. Online photography, and through extension nearly all visual art, have become, to many, almost disposable and merely transient. An artform where the artist and even the work itself are unimportant and, most likely, unknown.

To see the evidence of that, you need only open up your Facebook feed or look at what’s being shared on Pinterest.

It is clear that these words are not mine visually and by the citation link leading into the blockquote.

Your blog exercise today is to review previously published posts with quotes to ensure you are quoting and citing the sources properly.

If you are new to blogging, your blog exercise is to publish a post with quotes in it. Use short quotes with citation links in quote marks, and larger quotes with the blockquote feature as described in my article on how to properly cite and quote sources on your blog.

Remember to include a hat tip link back to this post to create a trackback, or leave a properly formed link in the comments so participants can check out your blog exercise task.

You can find more Blog Exercises on Lorelle on WordPress. This is a year-long challenge to help you flex your blogging muscles.

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