I have seen this method of quoting a source. It is often used in books and research essays, but I am unaware what it called, or if it is legal in the MLA or APA writing format. I have some screenshots to demonstrate it. The first uses text from The Wheel of Fire: Interpretations of Shakespearian Tragedy by George Wilson Knight:
The second quotes material from from Ophelia’s End—A document in Madness from The Riddles of Hamlet by Simon Augistine Blackmore. Boston, Stratford & Co.
I have also seen the quotation bolded and indented.
Answer
Section 11.11 of The Chicago Manual of Style 15th edition describes two styles of indicating quotations. One is the run-in quotations that are integrated into the text, and the other is quotations that are set off as block quotations, or extracts. Block Quotations are permitted in A.P.A., M.L.A. and presumably most other styles too, although the exact rules regarding how short they can be varies by style. H.T.M.L. even has a blockquote tag that you can use to indicate quotations that are set off like this, which I’ll show here:
A block quotation (also known as a long quotation or extract) is a quotation in a written document that is set off from the main text as a paragraph, or block of text, and typically distinguished visually using indentation and a different typeface or smaller size font. This is in contrast to setting it off with quotation marks in a run-in quote. Block quotations are used for long quotations. The Chicago Manual of Style recommends using a block quotation when extracted text is 100 words or more, or approximately six to eight lines in a typical manuscript.
This excerpt is from the Wikipedia’s Block Quotation entry, which is licensed under the terms of the CC-BY-SA 3.0 license.
You can click on the edit link below this answer to view the H.T.M.L. for it.
Attribution
Source : Link , Question Author : drew6017 , Answer Author : Tonepoet