How to Quote a Passage in Your Draft, with Its Source

The usual way to quote a book is to find the highlight, copy it, paste it into your draft, and then go back to the book to work out who wrote it and which edition you had. The source is the part that gets lost.

In the Writing Studio, you type @ instead. This guide covers what that does, how to choose a citation style, and what Nostos will and won’t put in a citation.

What you need first

The passages you want to quote have to be in Nostos already. Highlight them in the reader, or import your highlights from a Kobo, KOReader, Kindle or Readwise. Everything you keep stays attached to its book.

Quote with @

Open a writing in the Studio and type @ anywhere on the page. A search box opens. Type some of the words you remember, a title, or an author’s name. @schopenhauer will finds what you kept from Schopenhauer that mentions the will.

Each result shows the passage and where it came from, and anything you’ve kept is marked as kept. The highlighted result is shown in full beside the list, so you can read the whole passage before you decide.

Then choose how it goes in:

• Enter quotes it: the passage goes in as a block quote with its citation.
• Shift + Enter inserts it as a note: your own note on that source, cited after its last sentence.
• Ctrl + Enter inserts a reference only: a citation in your sentence, with no quoted text.

The same choices are behind the small “other ways to insert” button on each result if you’d rather use the mouse.

If the passage is long, Nostos opens it so you can pick the sentences you want rather than pasting a whole page.

Choose a citation style

Open Page settings in the Studio and go to Citation style. Each style is listed with an example, taken from a real book in your library, so you can see what you’d get before you pick.

There are seven:

• Nostos, the default. A plain line under the quote: author, title, and a page if there is one.
• APA 7, Harvard, Chicago (author–date) and MLA 9, which cite in brackets inside the text.
• Chicago (notes) and Oxford (footnotes), which put a footnote marker after the last word of the quote and the note itself at the end of your writing.

Change the style and the citations already in your writing follow. You don’t have to redo them.

The six styles are formatted from files by the Citation Style Language project, so they follow each style’s published rules.

When a page number appears, and when it doesn’t

Nostos only prints a page number when it is sure of it.

A highlight in a PDF belongs to a page of that PDF, so the citation can say p. 42.

An EPUB doesn’t have pages in that sense. A reflowable book is laid out differently on every screen, so a position in it isn’t a page in the printed book. Audiobooks have timestamps, which aren’t pages either. For these, Nostos leaves the page out.

If your style or your editor needs a page number from a printed edition, check it against the printed book yourself. Nostos won’t guess one.

When a book is missing details

A citation is built from the book’s details: author, title, year, publisher. If one is empty, Nostos tells you, naming the book and what’s missing, when you first cite it in a style that needs it. The default style only needs an author and a title. The other six also want a year and a publisher.

To fix it, go back to Page settings → Citation style. Books in your writing that lack a detail are listed at the top, with a field for each. Fill them in and every citation of that book is updated.

This is worth doing once per book. It is also why a citation is only as good as the book’s details: if the year in your library is wrong, the year in the citation is wrong.

What it doesn’t do

• It doesn’t check your claims, or that a quote is used fairly. That is yours to do.
• It doesn’t cite web pages or articles. It cites books in your library.
• It doesn’t invent details. A missing year stays missing until you add it.

Sending it on

When you’re done, the Studio can export to Word with real footnotes, to PDF, Markdown or a web page, or copy as rich text to paste into Substack or Google Docs. The export dialog has its own citation style control, so you can pick one for the export.