Researched Writing: Summarizing and Paraphrasing
Michael Bertsch
Too many direct quotes make the reader think that the writer doesn't really have anything to say, that the writer's assembling sort of a patchwork quilt paper. There's no unity, the flow is interrupted, the point is obscured by stylistic considerations. So I advise writers not to use too many direct quotes.

Kimberly Wise
Quoting is writing down someone's exact words. So that usually comes easier. But summarizing and paraphrasing, that's a class in itself, differentiating between those things. And usually, using some kind of… whatever text I'm using for that class, showing examples of how you shrunk down a whole page into a summary, for example.

Mike Rose
In summarizing, you have to make decisions about what you're gonna put in and what you're gonna leave out. How do you make those decisions, based on what criteria? How do you know those criteria are legitimate? What gets silenced or lost as you make those decisions to leave things out? Once you've decided what to put in, how are you going to organize those so they make sense each with the other and it's not just a bushel basket full of stuff that has no relation at all, each to the other? These are a series of very important decisions that show that even an act that's seemingly as dry as summarizing is as vital and alive and dynamic as any other kind of writing…writing or social act.

Chitra Divakaruni
I think that is one of the biggest tricks of the research paper is how to use outside information, but process it through your own intelligence and to your own thinking so that it becomes part of your own argument.

Jim Esh
You know, with scientific writing, you don't…generally you don't quote per se. What you really have done before you ever put word on paper is you've read everything on the topic that other people have said and almost never is there this whole big general consensus of opinion that everybody agrees on. So you've read and you've analyzed and you've said OK, this is the part of it that makes sense to me. And these five people… or these papers or these things that I'm summarizing are the ones that I really think have the kernel of truth that applies to my paper. So you are attributing things to other people, but there's a whole process of analysis…you're not stealing it.

Thomas Hilgers
One of the big difficulties we have is bringing that to bear on our own ideas, or making it part of my own argument. It's very easy to underline or to highlight, which many students do, things that strike us as important when we read. It's much more difficult to figure out how to carry what's important in somebody else's ideas into my own ideas and to make them work for me in my own argument.

Divakaruni
Your argument is the main thing in a research paper. Everything else is what you're using to support your own argument. Don't forget that your argument is always going to be the most important part of your research paper. If you don't have that firm, and if you're not comfortable and confident about that, no matter how much other stuff you're going to add in, it's just not going to work, and it'll get lopsided. And of course we go through exercises where we deal with bringing in an outside source and blending it into the paper, using paraphrase, using summary, using all of these different sources. And also, learning to give credit in the appropriate ways to people that they are indebted to.

John Lovas
So we've got occasional quotations, most of the material you take from reading you put in your own words which is paraphrasing, and then the way you organize this material, and the way you present it is your contribution. And the part that isn't your unique contribution, namely the ideas you took from a source or the words you took from a source, you say I got these from over here, but the way I put them together and the idea I'm making, the point I'm making is what's my unique contribution.

Joe Harris
As you do practice that kind of stuff, often one issue is, how do you lead into a quotation? Do you say, "This author says, this author argues," "If we look at author X," how do you introduce it and what do you say after you quote that person? And when you start to ask those questions you're beginning to talk about I think, more interesting intellectual issues, which is how you actually handle not just the typing part of it, but the idea part of it. But you handle the idea part of it by learning certain conventions.