Rules for writers, Tenth edition - Diana Hacker, Nancy Sommers 2021

Summarize and paraphrase effectively
Integrating sources
Writing Papers in APA Style

✵ How to paraphrase effectively

✵ Quotation marks with other punctuation

✵ Using sentence guides to integrate sources

✵ Using signal phrases in APA papers

Summaries, paraphrases, quotations, and data will help you support your argument, but they cannot speak for you. You need to find a balance between the words of your sources and your own voice, so that readers always know who is speaking in your paper. You can use several strategies to integrate research sources into your paper while maintaining your own voice.

✵ Use sources as concisely as possible so that your own thinking and voice aren’t lost (61a and 61b).

✵ Use signal phrases to indicate the boundary between your words and the source’s words (61c).

✵ Discuss and analyze your sources to show readers how each source supports your points and how sources relate to one another (61d).

61a Summarize and paraphrase effectively.

In your academic writing, keep the emphasis on your ideas and your language; use your own words to summarize and paraphrase sources and to explain your points. How you choose to use a source — as summary or paraphrase — depends on your purpose.

Summarizing

When you summarize a source, you express another writer’s ideas in your own words, condensing the author’s key points and using fewer words than the author. Even though a summary is in your own words, the original ideas remain the intellectual property of the author, so you must include a citation. Summarizing allows you to state the source’s main idea simply before you respond to or counter it.

See “When to summarize” (p. 388) for more advice.

Paraphrasing

When you paraphrase, you express an author’s ideas in your own words and sentence structure, using approximately the same number of words and details as in the source. Even though the words are your own, the original ideas are the author’s intellectual property, so you must give a citation. Paraphrasing allows you to capture a source’s ideas but perhaps simplify or reorder them.

See “When to paraphrase” (p. 388) for more advice. For a step-by-step guide to paraphrasing effectively, see the box in 56a.