A paraphrase, or indirect quotation, translates another person’s ideas or words in your own words. Unlike summary, it doesn’t shorten or condense the original statements and is used with short passages like a sentence or two. Paraphrasing is used when you wish to incorporate the source material into your paper, thesis, or dissertation, and you cannot string together a series of quotations. While direct quotation is used when you want to preserve the sourced words initially, therefore the words of those authors should be noteworthy to quote them directly.
As with summaries, paraphrases must be accurate as much as the direct quotation is reliable. The paraphrases have to be undistorted and wholly rewritten into the reviewer’s words. With the incorporation of similar words and sentence structure, following the words too closely is the most blatant form of plagiarism. To avoid plagiarism in the paraphrases, the writer can rearrange the order of the information, have a thesaurus or dictionary in hand to look for synonyms. The writer can also rephrase complex sentences in an easy-to-understand language for the readers to grasp the knowledge useful for their study.
However, direct quotations are best saved to preserve vivid, well-phrased dramatic statements and to provide accuracy of a statement that might be easily misinterpreted in the summary or paraphrase. All direct quotations must have lead-ins, as to explain its significance and enclose them in quotation marks. While only 10% of your paper can have plagiarised content, not more than 15 per cent of your should be directly quoted. So the writer must reserve the use of direct quotations for dramatic phrases and especially appropriate discussions. Now how will you segregate the literature of the topic to quote it directly, or to paraphrase the words for your literature review chapter?
Even though the direct quotation is correctly documented and punctuated, but the writer has not integrated it with a lead-in, an explanation, or a commentary on the quotation purpose. The statement needs a narrative lead-in at the beginning, middle, or the end of the sentence and the amount of information will depend on what is put in parentheses of the lead-in. Correctly punctuate and capitalise the quotations using either MLA, APA, Chicago, or whichever writing format you have to use. Use the format of the writing style correctly with the right punctuations and structure. To know which quote should be directly used and which quote should be summarised, you should look into the accuracy and the importance of the words of that author.
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