Quoting, Paraphrasing, and Summarizing

When to use? Quote texts when the wording is worth repeating or makes a point so well that no rewording is necessary. Paraphrase when sources are not worth quoting but contain details you need to include. Summarize longer passages whose main points are important but whose details are not.

Quoting Distinguish quoted material from your own by enclosing short quotations in quotation marks, setting off longer quotes as a block and using signal phrases. You want to sandwich your quotes in between an intro/signal phrase and then your own words including why it relates to the material you’re discussing. If you leave out part of a quote, use ellipses (…) in between the parts of the quote you do use. Brackets ([ ]) are used to indicate additions.

Quoting examples Men were the breadwinners and most important figures of the Grimm brothers’ time period and in the 1800s, “A man was seen as a banker, a doctor, a teacher, or a tradesman before much else was known of his family background, character or aspirations” (Volo 52). The notion of being highly involved in their children’s lives most likely never occurred to these men due to the expectations of their time, and this can easily be seen in the tales.

Block quoting example Jack Zipes has written that, Numerous critics have regarded Perrault’s tales as written directly for children, but they overlook the fact that there was no children’s literature per se at that time, and that most writers of fairy tales were composing and reciting their tales for their peers in the literary salons. (“Why Fairy Tales Stick” 73) Children’s literature is actually a more modern division of literature, coming about in the mid-seventeenth century.

Paraphrasing When you paraphrase, you restate information from a source in your own words, using your own sentence structures. You still need to in-text cite something that you paraphrase since there won’t be quotation marks to mark it as obviously taken from a text.

Paraphrasing example However, Beauty is actually called Rosamond in The Sleeping Beauty and it was not a group of fairy godmothers who were involved, but “wise women” (Grimm 96). Some versions of The Sleeping Beauty say that the thorns turned into “large flowers,” but other specifically say that the thorns turned into roses (Grimm 98).

Summarizing A summary states the main ideas found in a source concisely and in your own words. The difference between a summary and a paraphrased section is that a summary does not present all of the details, so it is as brief as possible.