We tend to think of primary sources as works of fiction (poetry, drama, novels), but in fact the term covers a far wider selection of works. It can also refer to journalism, essays, treatises, diaries, interviews and a range of other material. A secondary source, in contrast, describes or interprets a primary source.

You might want to quote from a primary source to give further support to your own ideas and arguments, to indicate a particular point or – again, especially in literary studies – to analyse the source in question.

Whatever your reason, the following guidelines should be kept in mind when using primary sources in the humanities:

• Avoid lengthy quotations. Summarizing the source is a more effective way of using it if you need to refer to an extensive amount of text.
  
  
• Be careful if you are incorporating the quotation into the structure of your own sentence. Whatever source you use, it must be grammatically coherent with the sentence in which it appears.  
  
  
• Avoid using snippets of quotation within a single sentence. This will appear as clumsy writing on your part and suggests that you have not adequately integrated the source into your own text.
  
  
• Do not modify the primary text without indicating this. Modification includes modernizing spelling, changing capital letters, adding emphasis (italics, bold, underline) or altering the word for grammatical reasons. If the original quotation contains an error, that must also be indicated using the Latin adverb sic meaning “thus” or “just as” (from the full form sic erat scriptum, “thus was it written”). Otherwise, it might be assumed that the error is your own.
  
  
• Always give precise bibliographical indications of the source material, either in parenthesis or as a footnote. Fuller details must also be given in the bibliography. The reader should be able to access this source material on the basis of the references that you provide.
  
  
• Ensure that all quotation – short or long – conforms strictly to the writing format applicable to your end-of-degree project (MLA, Chicago, etc.).