Why use quotations, paraphrases, and summaries?

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 354.

Quotations, paraphrases, and summaries serve many purposes. You might use them to . . .

Provide support for claims or add credibility to your writing

Refer to work that leads up to the work you are now doing

Give examples of several points of view on a subject

Call attention to a position that you wish to agree or disagree with

Highlight a particularly striking phrase, sentence, or passage by quoting the original

Distance yourself from the original by quoting it in order to cue readers that the words are not your own

Expand the breadth or depth of your writing

Writers frequently intertwine summaries, paraphrases, and quotations. As part of a summary of an article, a chapter, or a book, a writer might include paraphrases of various key points blended with quotations of striking or suggestive phrases as in the following example:

In his famous and influential work On the Interpretation of Dreams, Sigmund Freud argues that dreams are the "royal road to the unconscious" (page #), expressing in coded imagery the dreamer's unfulfilled wishes through a process known as the "dream work" (page #). According to Freud, actual but unacceptable desires are censored internally and subjected to coding through layers of condensation and displacement before emerging in a kind of rebus puzzle in the dream itself (page #s).