Quotations
| When |
How |
Generally, we use quotations when we either
want to
a) acknowledge an author's idea or
b) use their exact words.
We might, e.g.:
- find their original language quite memorable,
 or
- want to introduce key terms associated with a particular author
Otherwise, wherever possible, it is probably advisable to
rely on our own words, through summary or paraphrase. |
When quoting, you use the writer's actual
words, placed in between inverted commas ("..."), plus, in sequence:
(1) the author's surname
(2) the date of publication of the book and
(3) the page number of the reference [this
is very important and the most common failing in students' attempts at quotation].Let's
take a statement by Henderson we might want to refer to:
"Universities are the guardians of intellectual freedom and the
search for truth" (Henderson, 1969: 25)
The exact form varies; reference to the author
can either be
|
Reported Speech
Reported speech is simply the words of the author taken out of quotation marks
and put into a reported form.
These are either verbatim statements (i.e.
exact original wording) or they are a close paraphrase;
e.g.'Marx said that ... - the rest is either verbatim or
closely paraphrased.
The general rule with reported speech is to turn everything into the past tense.
This is commonly seen in journalism, when live speech is regularly turned
into the next day's news story.
Note: Since academic texts tend always to be regarded as 'live'
documents, it is common to find the present tense used; e.g.:
'Henderson (1969) states that ...'.
Academics often change their views over time, so writers often use the past tense to
refer to the ideas of authors who are still alive and writing. In these 2 short examples,
Thompson refers to his own past work, using the present perfect and past tenses:
- "Thompson regarded Ricoeur's proposal to conceive of
action as a text as unsatisfactory..... " (Thompson, 1981a: 127).
- " While Ricoeur was aware of the limitations of a theory of
action that ignored social structures, Thompson has argued that he failed to
provide an adequate account of the relation between action and social structure."
(Thompson, 1981a: 129)
Note: Writers are often misquoted or quoted 'out
of context'; this is another good reason for providing exact
references (incl. page numbers) when you attribute ideas to an author.
Summary and Paraphrase
You can only quote a certain amount before your reader wonders why s/he shouldn't just
go and read the original authors! Summarising &
paraphrasing what other people have written is the 'bread and butter'
of academic writing.
Summary and paraphrase mean using your
words to express someone else's ideas;
a rough distinction is that
paraphrasing refers to
editing the text, &
summarising refers to
editing the ideas;
We are interested in the 2 techniques we use to acknowledge the authors whose ideas we
are summarising or paraphrasing:
These 2 skills (summary and paraphrase) come together in the need for abstract
vocabulary, where you summarise views for or against a particular situation, phenomenon,
feature or difference; e.g.
"Such differences may be related to ... whether responsibility
for communication rests with the reader or writer"
(Hinds, 1983; Clyne, 1987).
Referring to Additional Sources
Last updated 27 October 2001