When to Direct Quote, Paraphrase, or Summarize

Direct Quotes

A direct quote might be most familiar to you—using quotation marks (“ ”) to indicate the moments that you’re borrowing, when you reproduce an author’s words verbatim in your own writing. Use a direct quote if someone else wrote or said something in a distinctive or particular way and you want to capture their words exactly. Direct quotes are good for establishing credibility and providing evidence.

Paraphrasing

Paraphrasing is similar to the process of summary. When we paraphrase, we process information or ideas from another person’s text and put them in our own words. The main difference between paraphrase and summary is scope: if summarizing means rewording and condensing, then paraphrasing means rewording without drastically altering length. However, paraphrasing is also generally more faithful to the spirit of the original; whereas a summary requires you to process and invites your own perspective, a paraphrase ought to mirror back the original idea using your own language.

Paraphrasing is helpful for establishing background knowledge or general consensus, simplifying a complicated idea, or reminding your reader of a certain part of another text. It is also valuable when relaying statistics or historical information, both of which are usually more fluidly woven into your writing when spoken with your own voice.

Summary

Summary, as discussed earlier in this chapter, is useful for “broadstrokes” or quick overviews, brief references, and describing the state of knowledge. When you summarize, you reword and condense another author’s writing. Be aware, though, that summary also requires individual thought: when you reword, it should be a result of you processing the idea yourself, and when you condense, you must think critically about which parts of the text are most important.

Below, you can see three examples of these three tools. Consider how the direct quote, the paraphrase, and the summary each could be used to achieve different purposes.

Original Passage

“It has been suggested (again rather anecdotally) that giraffes do communicate using infrasonic vocalizations (the signals are verbally described to be similar—in structure and function—to the low-frequency, infrasonic “rumbles” of elephants). It was further speculated that the extensive frontal sinus of giraffes acts as a resonance chamber for infrasound production. Moreover, particular neck movements (e.g. the neck stretch) are suggested to be associated with the production of infrasonic vocalizations” (Baotic et al., 2015).

The video below highlights additional citations conventions worth noting that are demonstrated in the examples above (see Chapter 7 for more details on citing sources).

Adaptation

This section has been adapted from Chapter Five: Summary and Response in EmpoWORD: A Student-Centered Anthology and Handbook for College Writers by Shane Abrams, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

References

Baotic, A., Sicks, F. & Stoeger, A.S. (2015). Nocturnal ‘Humming’ Vocalizations: Adding a Piece of the Puzzle of Giraffe Vocal Communication. BioMed Central Research Notes Vol. 8, no. 425. US National Library of Medicine. doi: 10.1186/s13104-015-1394-3.