Summarizing, Quoting, and Paraphrasing

Using sources in your writing projects, like everything else, depends on the discourse community, genre, and your rhetorical situation—more specifically the assignment. For example, if you’re asked to analyze a speech for its historical significance, you’ll probably need to summarize its content in great detail. If you’re asked to analyze that speech for its rhetorical or literary devices—how its written—you’ll need to quote specific examples of, say, metaphors for example. If you’re asked to review and discuss published environmental impact studies, then you may not need to summarize each one in detail, but rather provide only a sentence or so about what each researcher studied and reported. You also may not wish to quote from the studies directly, but rather explain in your own words how the researchers collected their data and information—what they studied and how.

When incorporating sources into your writing, you might use them in a combination of three ways: summarizing, quoting, and paraphrasing. What’s the difference?

A summary focuses on the overall point of the text, as well as the main points (for more on summary writing see Chapter 3). A quote uses the exact words of the text in quotation marks. A paraphrase is when you restate the information from the text in your own words, using your own sentence structure.

How do you decide whether to summarize, quote, or paraphrase? It’s a good idea to provide a brief summary of a text—including relevant context information—before using any specific evidence from the text—in other words, before quoting or paraphrasing.

Quote a text because (1) the exact wording makes a point really well or it’s particularly well written or spoken, (2) you want to cite the exact words from an authority on the topic (whether you agree or disagree with their perspective), or (3) you want to emphasize this source.

Paraphrase information from a text that is not worth quoting but does provide evidence you need to include, or you need to put the information in your own words, in your own way of stating it, to make it clearer for your readers.

Note that both quoting and paraphrasing involve taking specific information or evidence from a text/a source and incorporating it into your own writing; this means that for both quotes and paraphrases, you need to use signal phrases and in-text citations to properly attribute them (for more on attributing sources see Chapter 4).

An Example of Summarizing, Quoting, and Paraphrasing

Let’s review the skills of summarizing, quoting, and paraphrasing by working through an example. Let’s say I’m planning to use the article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” by Nicholas Carr in the project I am writing.

I know that before I use specific evidence/an example from the text in my writing, I first need to provide readers with a brief summary of the author’s overall point. I really like the way Carr sums up his overall point so I decided to quote it:

Carr claims, “Never has a communication system played so many roles in our lives—or exerted such broad influence over our thoughts—as the Internet does today. Yet, for all that’s been written about the Net, there’s been little consideration of how, exactly, it’s reprogramming us.”

Note that I’m following MLA format for citing this source, which requires no in-text citations if the text—in this case a web site—has no page numbers; some other formats like APA require a paragraph number in in-text citations. (For more on citing see Chapter 4.) Notice the signal phrase “Carr claims.” Also note that I use a comma after the signal verb (which is in “literary present tense,” as signal verbs in MLA should be). Also, notice that the quote is exactly as it appears in the original text; if I needed to make any changes to the quote to fit the grammar of my own sentence, I would use brackets or ellipses.

What if I want to use a quote that Carr used in his text? I could directly say something like Carr quotes Google’s chief executive Eric Schmidt, “[Google is] a company that’s founded around the science of measurement. . .” (qtd. in Carr). I could leave out the part about Carr quotes thanks to “qtd. in.” (Again, this is different mechanically in other formats like APA). Notice I needed to use both brackets and ellipses to fit the quote into my sentence. Use these tools only when necessary; don’t overuse them or over-edit quotes.

Now let’s say I want to incorporate one of Carr’s ideas into my writing, but I think it would be clearer—and, quite frankly, sound better—for my readers to put it into my own words. I write a paraphrase.

Here is the actual quote from Carr:

“When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is re-created in the Net’s image. It injects the medium’s content with hyperlinks, blinking ads, and other digital gewgaws, and it surrounds the content with the content of all the other media it has absorbed. A new e-mail message, for instance, may announce its arrival as we’re glancing over the latest headlines at a newspaper’s site. The result is to scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration.”

So, I don’t want to use the word “gewgaws” in my piece, even if it’s in quotation marks—what does that even mean? Therefore, I take Carr’s idea and put it in my own words—still giving Carr the credit—in the following paraphrase, which is followed by my own ideas:

To support his point about how easily distracted people can be while reading online, Carr uses the ding of a new email message as an example. This phenomenon has only worsened since Carr’s writing. Unless they turn them off, people trying to read something online on their devices will be bombarded not only with pop-up adds requiring the precise click of an “x” to delete, but also a stream of texts and social media message announcements. Of course, we get all those messages taking a walk in the park now, too, thanks to our smartphones, ubiquitous after Carr wrote his article.

Note how clearly, thanks to the signal phrase, you can distinguish between Carr’s idea and example and mine; remember, in MLA if the text had page numbers an in-text citation with the page number would follow the paraphrase (in APA format you need to use a paragraph number). Notice as well how I was able to put Carr’s idea completely in my own words and sentence structure. Remember, a paraphrase that is too close to the original in both wording and sentence structure is a form of plagiarism. Either entirely place the author’s idea in your own words or quote it directly—and remember, both quotes and paraphrases need to be cited because they’re the author’s ideas and not yours.

Read example moves and phrases to use when integrating sources into your writing in Writing 250 – Writing & Rhetoric Advanced Composition.