Summarising and paraphrasing
We use sources in assignments to help use learn more beyond our lectures and seminars.
Your lecturers also expect you to use evidence to support you claims, which isn’t possible without including sources. The use of sources helps to demonstrate your learning and shows you understand the information you plan to use in your assignment.
Paraphrasing is when you use text from another author and put it into your own words. It will often be of a similar length to the original source. It shows you have understood how to borrow information from a source legitimately, avoids the overuse of quotations, and allows your voice to be heard in your work.
Summarising is when you put text from another author into your own words, but instead you condense the information. This helps you to pick out the key points the author is making and express information clearly using less text. It’s a useful technique when you want to write a global summary of a whole text, or to summarise a part of the text to support a claim.
Using quotations is another method you can use and is often easy to use and an accurate representation of the original source. However, these should be used sparingly as using too many can dilute your own voice, and does not necessarily prove you understand the information, which could impact the quality of your writing.
When you paraphrase or summarise an author’s words, you must put a citation in the text and a full reference in your bibliography or reference list at the end.
The Academic Integrity module on Learn has a dedicated section on summarising and paraphrasing and includes useful examples, techniques and interactive activities for you to try to build your confidence in this area.