How to Format a Block Quote in APA 7 (40+ Words)

You counted the words in your quote once, decided it looked "short enough," and dropped it into your paragraph with quotation marks around it. It was 43 words. That single miscount is enough to cost you points before your professor even weighs in on the argument inside it, and it happens to careful writers just as often as rushed ones.

This is the apa block quote format rule, and it lives in APA 7, Section 8.27. A quotation of 40 words or more has to be pulled out of your paragraph and set as its own indented block, no quotation marks, still double-spaced. A quotation of fewer than 40 words stays exactly where it is, inside your sentence, with quotation marks intact. Most students know a rule exists somewhere around "long quotes get special treatment." Few know the number is 40, and fewer still know what changes besides the indent. Here is the whole rule, one working example, and the two details that trip almost everyone up.

The APA block quote format rule, and why the number is 40

Count the words in the quotation itself, not the sentence it sits inside and not the lines it takes up on the page. Forty words or more: block quote. Thirty-nine or fewer: it stays inline, in quotation marks, inside your own paragraph (Section 8.27). There is no rounding and no "close enough." If you are counting on your fingers at 38 and 39, count again properly, because the two formats are not interchangeable.

Why it matters: the threshold does real work. A short quotation works inside a paragraph because a reader's eye can hold your sentence and the borrowed one at the same time. A long quotation left inside a paragraph does the opposite. It buries your own writing under someone else's for several lines, and the reader loses track of where your argument stopped and the source began. Pulling the quotation onto its own indented block signals the switch before the reader reads a single word of it.

The mistake: we see two versions of this go wrong about equally often. One is a 45-word quote left inline, quotation marks and all, buried in the middle of a paragraph. The other is a 30-word quote over-formatted as a block because it "felt long." Our breakdown of block quote formatting errors covers both directions in more detail, but the fix for either one starts with actually counting the words.

The exact format, word for word

Once a quotation crosses 40 words, four things happen to it at the same time, and all four apply every time (Section 8.27):

• It starts on a new line, separate from the sentence that introduces it.
• The entire block indents 0.5 inches from the left margin, the same distance as a first-line paragraph indent, applied to every line instead of just the first.
• The quotation marks disappear completely. The indent is now doing the job the quotation marks used to do.
• It stays double-spaced, exactly like the rest of your paper. A block quote does not get tighter spacing to save room.

Here is what that looks like with an actual quotation run through it:

Academic writing earns its authority by staying accountable to evidence the reader could verify independently. A citation supplies that trail: it gives another researcher the path back to the original claim, and a paper that obscures that path has failed at the one job academic writing is supposed to do. (Alvarez, 2021, p. 47)

Look at what is not there: no quotation marks anywhere in that paragraph, and no shift in spacing from the rest of the page. The half-inch indent and the fact that the quotation sits alone are carrying all the signaling that quotation marks would normally do.

Where the citation goes, and the detail almost everyone reverses

The mistake: writers who already know the 40-word rule often still punctuate the citation like an inline quote, closing with a period before the parenthetical: "...to do." (Alvarez, 2021, p. 47). That period does not belong there once the quote is a block. It is a one-character habit that catches practiced writers as often as beginners, and it takes about as long to fix as it did to make.

In an inline quotation, the citation sits inside the sentence and the final period lands after the closing parenthesis: "the one job academic writing is supposed to do" (Alvarez, 2021, p. 47). In a block quote, the order flips. The quotation keeps its own closing punctuation, the citation follows outside it, and the citation itself gets no period of its own:

...has failed at the one job academic writing is supposed to do. (Alvarez, 2021, p. 47)

Why it matters: a stray period after a citation, or a missing one before the quotation's own closing punctuation, is one of the fastest ways to signal that a paper was formatted by ear instead of by the rule. It is a small mark, and it is exactly the kind of small mark a careful reader, or a formatting tool, catches immediately. If you want the same logic applied to quotation marks more broadly, our guide to APA punctuation rules for quotation marks covers the inline version side by side with this one.

The fix: finish the quotation with whatever end punctuation the original sentence used, then add the parenthetical citation immediately after it with nothing following. No trailing period. Check this one specifically before you submit, because habit and autocorrect both push toward the inline pattern.

When the quotation runs more than one paragraph

Occasionally the passage you are quoting spans two or more paragraphs in the original source. When that happens, the block-quote indent still applies to the whole passage, but you add one more step: indent the first line of the second paragraph, and any paragraph after it, an additional 0.5 inches beyond the block's own margin (Section 8.27). The rest of each paragraph returns to the block's normal 0.5-inch indent. This is the one place a block quote gets a first-line indent at all, and it exists only to mark where the source's own paragraph break falls, so a reader does not mistake a two-paragraph passage for one unbroken block.

Setting the indent in Word

The fastest way to get this right is to build the block quote after you have already typed the words, not while you are typing them.

The fix: select the full quotation, then go to Layout → Indent → Left and set it to 0.5". If your version of Word does not show that field on the ribbon, open the Paragraph dialog instead (right-click the selection → Paragraph) and set Indentation, Left to 0.5". Delete any quotation marks you typed around it, and confirm the line spacing still matches the rest of your paper rather than reverting to single-spaced. That is the entire setup: one indent value, no quotation marks, same spacing as everything else on the page.

Under 40 words? Leave it inline

A quotation that does not reach the 40-word threshold does not get any of the block treatment, even if it looks substantial on the page. It stays inside your paragraph, in quotation marks, with the citation worked in the ordinary way: either at the end of the sentence, like this (Alvarez, 2021, p. 47), or with the author's name folded into your own sentence, as in Alvarez (2021) argued that a citation without a verifiable trail fails at its basic job. The period goes after the closing parenthesis, not before it, which is the opposite order from the block quote. If you want the rest of the APA 7 citation and page setup rules in one place, our complete guide to APA 7th edition format walks through the inline citation system alongside everything else the manual covers.

Do this in one step instead

You can count words, set indents, and check citation punctuation by hand every time you quote a source, and for one long quotation that is manageable. This is exactly the layer of the work we built StyleMyPaper to handle: upload the draft and it looks for quotations that should have been converted to a block, along with the rest of the APA 7 layer, then formats what needs it and shows you every change it made. See how the APA formatting tool handles it.