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Paraphrasing and Quoting

Tips on paraphrasing and quotations when you use a source's ideas or writing in your own work.

Quoting & Paraphrasing

Quoting and Paraphrasing

When using information from writing by other authors and researchers, quotation and paraphrasing (along with citation) must be applied for the following reasons:

  • Support for claims in your own writing and to add credibility
  • Show the chain of previous research that has led to your own
  • Highlight a particularly striking phrase, sentence, or passage by quoting the original
  • To avoid charges of plagiarism (simply copying and pasting the original author’s work).

Quotation and paraphrasing help you better process the ideas you come across in your research and synthesize them together to build your own thesis and conclusions.

Copying and pasting to a limited extent is allowable if proper attribution is given to the original author in a citation. Quoted text must either appear within quotation marks, or in an indented paragraph. Lengthy direct quotations are to be avoided, and not repeated.

Paraphrasing is putting the original author’s ideas in your own words, without quotation marks (but still with an attributing citation). Paraphrased text generally will be a shortened version of the original verbiage, with an explanation of the relevancy of the original idea to the thesis of your own project.

Each citation style (APA, MLA, etc.) has its own format for quotation. Please use our citation style guides to guide your use of quotations in the style your instructor chooses for your assignment.

Citation Style Guides

Works cited:
“Quoting, Paraphrasing, and Summarizing.” Purdue University Online Writing Lab (OWL), https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/research_and_citation/using_research/quoting_paraphrasing_and_summarizing/index.html.