When you write an article, report, paper or other assignment, you often use the work of other people, i.e. sources. You can directly copy a statement by means of a quote or convert it into your own words: paraphrase. They can come from written and digital sources. There’s nothing wrong with using resources, but you can’t just take over everything. You should always let us know where you got the information from and who wrote or said it. You always refer to this twice in your article. Once in the text and once in the bibliography.
Cite and paraphrase
In a text you have to make a clear distinction between quotes, paraphrases and what you say yourself. When you write a review, argument, letter or essay, you should not quote too often. That is because you damage the readability of the article, while the main aim of such articles is to let your own points of view, reasoning or argumentation come to the fore.
You can use someone else’s words in your own text in three ways. You can quote, quote part and omit part (quote with an ellipse) and you can paraphrase. All three cases are listed below, always based on the same piece of text.
A short quote
The quotation is therefore placed between quotation marks and after the quotation the writing of the source text and the year of publication are given between brackets. If the writing is unknown, state the source and the complete date of publication.
A long quote
With a long quote you do not use quotation marks, but you indent, so that a ‘block’ of text is created. Mentioning the author, source, year or date remains the same.
A quote with ellipse
The omitted text now contains square brackets with dots in between.
A paraphrase
The text is now displayed in your own words. The paraphrased text makes it clear what research is involved and by whom. The citation starts with “To” to indicate that you are paraphrasing rather than quoting. You can follow the link to paraphrase your work https://paraphrasingtool.site/
Bibliography
In the bibliography at the end of your text, you list the sources used in alphabetical order. You do this by last name. If you don’t remember the author’s name or surname, replace it and use that abbreviation when alphabetizing. The way you should create a title description depends on the type of source you used. You describe books differently than articles, and referring to websites has to be different.
Written Resources
A written source means a book or (newspaper) article. For a book you give at least the author, the title, the name of the publisher and the place and year of publication. The order of the data and the punctuation marks is important. It is also important to underline the title of the book. Italics are also allowed, as long as you are consistent.
Exception
If you quote from a newspaper article that you have found on the Internet, for example an article from the newspaper bank, you are pretending it is a written source. In that case, you do not have to follow the above-mentioned guideline, but the guideline for written sources.
