Within the pages of your research essay, it is important to properly reference and cite your sources to avoid plagiarism and to give credit for original ideas.

There are three main ways to put a source to use in your essay: you can quote it, you can summarize it, and you can paraphrase it.

Quoting

Direct quotations are words and phrases that are taken directly from another source, and then used word-for-word in your paper. If you incorporate a direct quotation from another author’s text, you must put that quotation or phrase in quotation marks to indicate that it is not your language.

When you write direct quotations, it’s a good idea to use the source author’s name in the same sentence as the quotation to introduce the quoted text and to indicate the source in which you found the text. Think of this habit in terms of INTD 105’s model of academic writing as joining a conversation: it’s a social norm to introduce yourself or a speaker before you or they contribute to a conversation. You should then include the page number or other relevant information in parentheses at the end of the phrase (the exact format will depend on the formatting style of your essay: later modules of this course cover documentation styles).

Summarizing

Summarizing involves condensing the main idea of a source into a much shorter overview. A summary outlines a source’s most important points and general position, but, in academic writing, such summaries seldom appear in a vacuum. Typically, you summarize a source in such a way that it serves the thesis of your own writing. Finding the balance between highlighting the connections to your own thesis and remaining faithful to the original context and emphasis of your source is not easy: many students err either in the direction of too much unfocused summary (“And the next point this author makes is that. . .”), which can distract readers from their own point, or in the direction of a failure to represent the original context accurately, which often happens when they choose a source that is only tangentially related to their topic (because they picked the first hit in the result list without checking its CRAAP rating. . .) and attempt to present it as if it were a highly relevant source, wresting it from its original concerns. Many students are good at summarizing sources as an exercise in itself, but find summarizing at the college level, where you need to connect the summary to your own key terms, much more challenging.

When summarizing a source, it is still necessary to use a citation to give credit to the original author. You must reference the author or source in the appropriate citation method at the end of the summary; again, the author will often appear in the body of the summary, but each instance will depend on context, the conventions of the academic field, and other variables.

Paraphrasing

When paraphrasing, you may put any part of a source (such as a phrase, sentence, paragraph, or chapter) into your own words. You may find that the original source uses language that is more clear, concise, or specific than your own language, in which case you should use a direct quotation, putting quotation marks around those unique words or phrases you don’t change.

It is common to use a mixture of paraphrased text and quoted words or phrases, as long as the direct quotations are inside quotation marks.

Sources that are not properly integrated into your paper are like “bricks without mortar: you have the essential substance, but there’s nothing to hold it together, rendering the whole thing formless” (Smith).

Providing Context for Your Sources

Whether you use a direct quotation, a summary, or a paraphrase, it is important to distinguish the original source from your ideas, and to explain how the cited source fits into your argument. While the use of quotation marks or parenthetical citations tells your reader that these are not your own words or ideas, you should introduce the quotation with a description, in your own terms, of what the quotation says and why it is relevant to the purpose of your paper. You should not let quoted or paraphrased text stand alone in your paper, but rather, should integrate the sources into your argument by providing context and explanations about how each source supports your argument.^[1]

It can be tempting to hand over your essay to other voices, especially to voices that have already received academia’s stamp of approval by being peer-reviewed and published. Students often expect that such voices will stand alone, proving their own argument’s validity through sheer weight of authority. It’s important to remember, however, that your professors are not evaluating the authority of a peer-reviewed argument so much as they evaluating your ability to manage an academic conversation. When you thrust a quotation onto the center stage of your essay and then scurry off-stage yourself, you’re missing the opportunity to manage the moment. Here’s an example of a poorly executed quotation from INTD 105’s most commonly assigned writing handbook, They Say / I Say; authors Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein describe what follows as a “typical hit-and-run quotation by a writer responding to an essay by the feminist philosopher Susan Bordo, who laments that media pressures on young women to diet are spreading to previously isolated regions of the world like the Fiji islands” (44-45).

Susan Bordo writes about women and dieting. “Fiji is just one example. Until television was introduced in 1995, the islands had no reported cases of eating disorders. In 1998, three years after programs from the United States and Britain began broadcasting there, 62 percent of the girls surveyed reported dieting.” I think Bordo is right. Another point Bordo makes is that…

The authoritative claim by Bordo, complete with statistics and dates, is presented as if these facts in the hands of this established scholar are the final word on “women and dieting,” as the hugely broad and unfocused first sentence suggests. Even its introductory verb, “writes about,” is bland and unhelpful: Bordo is lamenting what happened in Fiji, not “writing about” it. The writer makes no attempt to remind the reader what their own thesis is (hopefully more than a statement that “women and dieting” is a topic – what is this writer arguing about women and dieting? Is the writer’s essay focused on media influences? On Pacific islands? On eating disorders? On girls? If it’s a standard five-page essay, the answer should not be “all of the above,” so the reader needs guidance.) The inadequate comment, “I think Bordo is right,” abdicates the writer’s responsibility to restate a source so that it clearly comments on the writer’s own thesis. Saying “she’s right” puts all the responsibility of connecting Bordo’s comments to the writer’s thesis on the reader. We all assume that Bordo’s facts and figures are “right,” but in an analytical essay, the facts and figures are not as important as the interpretation those elements support, and on that crucial question of how exactly the quotation from Bordo supports this writer’s thesis, our writer is silent. Instead, the writer rushes off to another point Bordo made, clearly hoping that Bordo will carry the essay herself.