To Quote or Not to Quote?

In drawing ideas or information from a source, you have three choices:

  • Summary: boil down the idea or information, transforming a page into a sentence or an article into a paragraph.
  • Paraphrase: flesh out an idea or present information in your own words, perhaps using new examples, with only minor changes in the length.
  • Quotation: use the precise wording from the source (in quotation marks).

Let’s think about how you might use these different approaches to presenting a source, depending on the role of that source in your project. Imagine that you’re writing an essay that critiques the current system of higher education in the United States:

  1. Which method is best suited to presenting Harari’s notion of shared fictions as a Theory source?
  2. Which method is best suited to presenting a course syllabus as an Exhibit source?
  3. Which method is best suited to presenting an essay on higher education as an Argument source?
  4. Which method is best suited to presenting college enrollment statistics collated by the US government as a Background source?

Post your answers to these questions in this Google Form.

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