Writing Quotation

Formatting rules for quoting external sources inside a Markdown document. Other skills that produce sourced deliverables (survey, paper-details, and similar) reference this one.

1. Why quote the original

A summary alone does not let the reader judge whether the writer's reading of the source is correct. Placing the original alongside lets the reader cross-check the writer's interpretation against the source itself. Quotations and prose (the writer's own summary or interpretation) must stay visually and structurally distinct.

2. Quotations always go inside code blocks

Quote external sources inside a fenced code block, regardless of content type — prose, prompt templates, code, XML-tagged text, anything. Do not use the blockquote syntax (>).

3. Structure of a quotation block

A quotation block has the following shape.