To illustrate the art of capturing source material, let’s first look at a passage from historian Barbara W. Tuchman. In A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century (New York: Knopf, 1978), Tuchman sets forth the effects of the famous plague known as the Black Death. In her foreword, she admits that any historian dealing with the Middle Ages faces difficulties. For one, large gaps exist in the records. Here is her original wording:

ORIGINAL

A greater hazard, built into the very nature of recorded history, is overload of the negative: the disproportionate survival of the bad side — of evil, misery, contention, and harm. In history this is exactly the same as in the daily newspaper. The normal does not make news. History is made by the documents that survive, and these lean heavily on crisis and calamity, crime and misbehavior, because such things are the subject matter of the documentary process — of lawsuits, treaties, moralists’ denunciations, literary satire, papal Bulls. No Pope ever issued a Bull to approve of something. Negative overload can be seen at work in the religious reformer Nicolas de Clamanges, who, in denouncing unfit and worldly prelates in 1401, said that in his anxiety for reform he would not discuss the good clerics because “they do not count beside the perverse men.”

Disaster is rarely as pervasive as it seems from recorded accounts. The fact of being on the record makes it appear continuous and ubiquitous whereas it is more likely to have been sporadic both in time and place. Besides, persistence of the normal is usually greater than the effect of disturbance, as we know from our own times. After absorbing the news of today, one expects to face a world consisting entirely of strikes, crimes, power failures, broken water mains, stalled trains, school shutdowns, muggers, drug addicts, neo-Nazis, and rapists. The fact is that one can come home in the evening — on a lucky day — without having encountered more than one or two of these phenomena.

Although you might highlight this passage as you read it, it is too long to include in your paper. Quoting it directly would let your source overshadow your own voice. Instead, you might quote a striking line or so and paraphrase the rest by restating the details in your own words. Here, the writer puts Tuchman’s ideas into other words but retains her major points and credits her ideas.

PARAPHRASE WITH QUOTATION

Tuchman points out that historians find some distortion of the truth hard to avoid, for more documentation exists for crimes, suffering, and calamities than for the events of ordinary life. As a result, history may overemphasize the negative. The author reminds us that we are familiar with this process in our news coverage, which treats bad news as more interesting than good news. If we believed that news stories told all the truth, we would feel threatened at all times by technical failures, crime, and violence—but we are threatened only some of the time, and normal life goes on. The good, dull, ordinary parts of our lives do not make the front page, and the praiseworthy tend to be ignored. “No Pope,” says Tuchman, “ever issued a Bull to approve of something.” But in truth, social upheaval did not prevail as widely as we might think from the surviving documents of medieval life (xviii).

In this reasonably complete paraphrase, about half as long as the original, most of Tuchman’s points are spelled out. The writer doesn’t interpret or evaluate Tuchman’s ideas — she only passes them on. Paraphrasing helps her emphasize ideas important to her research. It also makes readers more aware of them as support for her thesis than quoting the passage would. The writer has directly quoted Tuchman’s remark about papal Bulls because it would be hard to improve on that short, memorable statement.

Often you paraphrase to emphasize one point. This passage comes from Evelyn Underhill’s classic study Mysticism (New York: Doubleday, 1990):

ORIGINAL

In the evidence given during the process for St. Teresa’s beatification, Maria de San Francisco of Medina, one of her early nuns, stated that on entering the saint’s cell whilst she was writing this same “Interior Castle” she found her [St. Teresa] so absorbed in contemplation as to be unaware of the external world. “If we made a noise close to her,” said another, Maria del Nacimiento, “she neither ceased to write nor complained of being disturbed.” Both these nuns, and also Ana de la Encarnacion, prioress of Granada, affirmed that she wrote with immense speed, never stopping to erase or to correct, being anxious, as she said, to write what the Lord had given her before she forgot it.

Suppose that the names of the witnesses do not matter to a researcher who wishes to emphasize, in fewer words, the renowned mystic’s writing habits. That writer might paraphrase the passage (and quote it in part) like this:

PARAPHRASE WITH QUOTATION

Underhill has recalled the testimony of those who saw St. Teresa at work on The Interior Castle. Oblivious to noise, the celebrated mystic appeared to write in a state of complete absorption, driving her pen “with immense speed, never stopping to erase or to correct, being anxious, as she said, to write what the Lord had given her before she forgot it” (242).