Lesson: Quoting, Paraphrasing, and Avoiding Plagiarism

Part 1: Quoting, Paraphrasing, and Summarizing: How Are They Different?
Quoting requires taking a sentence or short passage from an original source and copying it into your own writing using quotation marks.

Paraphrasing involves using a passage from a reading and putting it into your own words. Paraphrasing generally condenses the original material slightly.

Summarizing is taking the main ideas of an extended reading and expressing them in your own words. Summaries are shorter than source material and give a broad overview.

The table below summarizes the primary differences between quoting, paraphrasing, and summarizing:

	Requires Citation	Wording	Additional Information
Quote	yes	author's words	Quotation marks are required.
Paraphrase	yes	your own words	Be sure to use your own language to avoid plagiarism.
Summary	yes	your own words	Be as clear and concise as possible. This generally applies to a long passage.

Consider the following text. How would you quote or paraphrase this information?

Mobile phones are cheap and ubiquitous, with massive growth globally, especially in sub-Saharan Africa. Mobile-phone–based health applications are proliferating rapidly and there are persuasive reasons why mobile technologies offer such potential.*

Quote sample
Mobile phones have many potential applications beyond basic communication, and one of these can be found in the health sector. For example, in Tanzania today, "mobile-phone–based health applications are proliferating rapidly" (Mtema et al., 2016). 

Paraphrase sample
In Tanzania and other sub-Saharan African countries, cell phones are frequently being used to track health-related data (Mtema et al., 2016).

 

Part 2: Avoiding Plagiarism in Your Writing
Plagiarism can be both intentional and unintentional and can happen in many forms including full papers, paragraphs, sentences, or ideas. Plagiarism can also occur when using spoken words, statistics and numbers, emails, websites, or many other sources. When you plagiarize, you

• use someone else's words or ideas without proper citation, and/or
• represent the words or ideas of others as your own. 

You can avoid plagiarism by keeping careful track of all materials you read and review as you research. When you choose to include information from an outside source, follow the suggestions for quoting and paraphrasing above, and be careful to always include full citation information for each source.

 

* This example comes from the following reading:
Mtema, Z., Changalucha, J., Cleaveland, S., Elias, M., Ferguson, H. M., Halliday, J. E. B., et al. (2016). Mobile phones as surveillance tools: Implementing and evaluating a large-scale intersectoral surveillance system for rabies in Tanzania. PLoS Med 13(4): 1-12. http://dx.doi.org/ 10.1371/journal.pmed.1002002