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MLA Style Manual, formerly titled MLA Style Manual and Guide to Scholarly Publishing in its second (1998) and third edition (2008), was an academic style guide by the United States–based Modern Language Association of America (MLA) first published in 1985. MLA announced in April 2015 that the publication would be discontinued: the third ...
The copied material should not be a substantial portion of the work being quoted and a long quotation should not be used where a shorter quotation would express the same information. What constitutes a substantial portion depends on many factors, such as the length of the original work, and the importance and relevance of the quoted text to ...
The long quotation from Dante's Inferno that prefaces T. S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" is part of a speech by one of the damned in Dante's Hell. The epigraph to E. L. Doctorow's Ragtime quotes Scott Joplin's instructions to those who play his music, "Do not play this piece fast. It is never right to play ragtime fast."
The plot summary for a work, on a page about that work, does not need to be sourced with inline citations, as it is generally assumed that the work itself is the primary source for the plot summary. However, if the summary includes a direct quote from the work, this must be cited using inline citations so that readers can easily verify it ...
Titles in quotation marks that include (or in unusual cases consist of) something that requires italicization for some other reason than being a title, e.g., a genus and species name, or a non-English phrase, or the name of a larger work being referred to, also use the needed italicization, inside the quotation marks: "Ferromagnetic Material in ...
In the case study, "Little Red Riding Hood", the actual story can be written in 10 pages. The plot is about 240 words. In a 300-page novel (not really long), a proportion plot summary would be 7,200 words - about as long as "Little Red Riding Hood". So "Little Red Riding Hood" is not a realistic example, it's far too easy.
A plot summary should be written in the narrative present tense. A summary for a full-length novel should be between 400 and 700 words. When a plot summary exceeds 700 words, look for things that can be trimmed without losing anything important. Very occasionally, there may be exceptional reasons that warrant a longer summary.
The only real change here is removal of long-standing Wikipedia preference for logical quotation. But editors have long time been writing articles by this standard and correcting articles to fit this standard. As with any change here, consensus is needed. And I don't see that occurring.