There are three ways to incorporate outside sources in your essays: quote, summarize, or paraphrase them. Each has a different purpose, but they must be properly cited.
Citations are used in academic writing to credit those who have contributed ideas you’ve drawn on for your paper. They can be either in-text or reference list sources.
Quotation
A quotation is a word-for-word presentation of something someone else said or wrote. It is signaled in oral speech by particular prosody and, in written text, by quotation marks.
The use of quotations is essential when writing about literature and linguistics, but they can also be used to provide variety in other genres. A well-chosen reference should relate to the writer’s ideas and arguments. In addition to using sources, essay writers from paperhelp can develop their opinions by paraphrasing or summarizing.
When using a quotation, it is helpful to introduce and follow the quote with an explanation, comment, or analysis that connects the sections back to the writer’s ideas. Please do so to avoid an unfocused, confusing essay. Failing to cite a quote, regardless of its use correctly, can be plagiarism. For this reason, a writer must understand the conventions of a given style guide before attempting to use a source.
Summarization
Writing an essay summarizing or condensing a source is helpful for various reasons. It can save time by providing a quick overview of a longer document, helping readers understand and retain the main ideas, and demonstrating a writer’s ability to critically examine and evaluate a topic.
Reading the source material at least twice and annotating the text is essential to write a summary. A well-written resume includes a thorough, accurate restatement of the original author’s ideas without having any of your interpretations or deductions. However, be careful not to omit any significant details or information in your summary that could be misinterpreted as plagiarism (see Graff and Birkenstein’s They Say/I Say for more on this).
A good strategy is to write a list of the most essential points from each source and then determine the order in which those points should go in your final summary. If you forget a crucial moment when writing the essay, you can quickly refer to your list and fill in the missing information.
Paraphrasing
Paraphrasing is a legitimate way to incorporate source material into an essay, but it should be used sparingly. Using your own words to rewrite the essential points of a passage from another author, rather than directly quoting, can add power and authority to an argument while reducing the risk of accidental plagiarism. Paraphrasing involves reading important passage sections until you fully understand its meaning. Then, you write your version of the passage, incorporating key terms and creating sentence structures. Your paraphrase should faithfully represent the original text, so if you need clarification on whether it does, refer back to your source for verification.
Paraphrases differ from summaries, as they take a much broader section of the original passage and include more details. However, they should still be attributed to the original author. A good paraphrase should be as close to the original phrasing as possible without being verbatim.
Citing
Many writing assignments require you to include outside source material that supports your argument or explains the subject’s background. This can be in articles, books, films, interviews, surveys, websites, and other data sets. Incorporating this information is essential to build your credibility with your audience, avoid plagiarism claims, and show that you have done your research.
There are three ways to incorporate a source into your essay: quoting, paraphrasing, and summarizing. Each of these methods requires a citation that is included at the point of use in the article and reflected in your bibliographic page at the end of the essay. There are specific rules for creating these citations depending on your reference style, which must be followed to avoid plagiarism.