Quoting, Paraphrasing, and Summarizing

Chapter 22 talks and explains about the proper way to quote, paraphrase, and summarize literature. When quoting someone else’s work it is very important to site your source, and give credit where credit is due. Otherwise, it is called plagiarism. When you quote something, you are quoting it because it is so well said its worth repeating. Enclosed short quotation, “such quotations should not be longer than four typed lines.” (390) IN MLA format for poetry you can categorize the phrases with slash marks. For long quotations, use a block quote. Block quotes are used for quoting what people say if it exceeds four lines. You use brackets to indicate that you have slightly changed a quote so it is grammatically correct. A good thing to remember while writing is where you put punctuation marks. Colons and semi-colons go outside the closing quotation marks. However, question and exclamation marks go inside the closing quotation. Phrasing is restating information from a source using your own words. (Don’t forget to site the source you paraphrased.) Paraphrasing is very complicated because you have to choose your words and sentence structures very carefully. You can use too many of the same words or sentence structure from the original text. A summary is similar to paraphrasing, but with summarizing you only point out the main ideas and the important facts. In all cases, you need to introduce your topic and make sure you site all of the sources you used.