Overview
There are three ways to use borrowed material in a paper: summaries, paraphrases, and quotes. Find out the differences between these in the boxes below, and how to create successful summaries, paraphrases, and quotes.
No matter how you include borrowed material in your paper, you WILL need to cite it using both an in-text citation and an entry in the longer works cited list at the end. Each citation style is different, but all styles will require you to use both in-text citation and full citations in a works cited entry for every paraphrase, summary, or quote you make in your paper.
Summaries
The purpose of a summary is to capture the main idea of someone else's writing using your own words.
Summaries are useful when you have read a longer piece of work, from a page to an entire article or book, and you want to include the major points of that piece without all of the detail. To create a successful summary, you need to condense the original work into a shortened version: a good rule of thumb is that the summary should be a third of the length of the original or less. Summaries must use your own words and sentence structure--professors can tell when you've taken a sentence from the beginning, middle, and end of the original work!
Even though summaries use your own words and sentence structure, they must include an in-text citation.
Quotes
Quotes are the easiest way to use borrowed material! All you have to do is pull a piece of text from the original text you're using (you must use the EXACT wording of the original), put quotation marks around it, and put an in-text citation at the end.
Some reasons for using a quote rather than a summary or a paraphrase are:
- The original language is especially vivid or expressive
- Exact wording is needed for accuracy
Paraphrases
When writing a paraphrase, the goal is to re-write another person's words or ideas in your own words without altering the original meaning. Unlike a summary, where the goal is to condense the original content, a good paraphrase will be about the same length as the original text, but written in your own words.
Paraphrases are particularly helpful when you find a longer piece of text -maybe a paragraph or a few sentences-, and you want to include all of that information in your own paper without putting in a giant block quote (professor don't love block quotes!). A paraphrase allows you to take all of the original information and rewrite it so that it makes sense for the exact argument you are making in your paper, instead of the argument that was being made in the other paper. For this reason, paraphrases are extremely useful.
Paraphrases can be difficult to master: many people find it hard to rewrite a sentence without simply writing synonyms for each original word in the sentence. However, after a little practice, you too can be a paraphrasing master. See the example below for a good paraphrase--and note the in-text citation at the end!
