Writing Paraphrases

When you write a report or research paper, you need to support your ideas with information from other sources and give credit to those sources. (Not giving credit is a serious error called Plagiarism.) We have already gone over how to cite information directly; we called that a direct quote. When you paraphrase you are using your own words to restate the author’s ideas; when you use a direct quote, you use the author’s exact words and you put those words in quotation marks. Paraphrasing has the same parenthetical citation at the end, however, there are not quotation marks because you did not quote the author directly.

When writing a paraphrase

1. stick to the author’s essential ideas

2. state each important idea as clearly and concisely as possible

3. put quotation marks around the key words or phrases taken directly from the source

4. arrange the ideas into a smooth logical order

Your parenthetical citation will be exactly the same except for the quotation marks.

You want your paper to be a balanced mix of direct quotations and paraphrases.