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Margin Notes
Academic Writing Workbench
Source-Use Skills for Academic English

Borrow ideas without losing your own voice.

Three ways to bring another writer's words into your own text — and how to keep every source honest. Work through each tab, try the interactive drills, and watch how a sentence is revised line by line.

01 · Definition

Quoting

Quoting means copying someone's exact words and marking them clearly as borrowed — with quotation marks and a citation — because the original wording itself matters.

When a direct quote earns its place

  • USE the wording is precise, technical, or memorable enough that paraphrasing would weaken it
  • USE you are analysing or disputing the author's exact language
  • USE the source is an authority whose exact position needs to be on record
  • AVOID stringing long quotes together instead of writing your own analysis

The four parts of a correct quote

  • 1 A signal phrase that names the source before or after the quote
  • 2 Quotation marks around the exact original wording, unchanged
  • 3 An in-text citation showing where the words came from
  • 4 Square brackets [ ] or an ellipsis … if you alter or shorten the original
Correctly formatted According to Zainal (2021), "student motivation drops sharply once feedback is delayed beyond two weeks" (p. 44), which explains why fast grading matters.

Try it — spot the correct quote

02 · Definition

Paraphrasing

Paraphrasing means restating someone else's idea, in full, using your own words and your own sentence structure — the meaning stays the same, but almost nothing of the original phrasing survives.

Four strategies for rewriting a sentence

Practise a strategy yourself

Pick a strategy above, then rewrite the sentence below using it. This checker looks at word overlap only — always judge the meaning yourself too.

"The government introduced the new policy quickly because public pressure had grown too strong to ignore."
03 · Definition

Summarizing

Summarizing means condensing a longer text down to its main ideas only, in your own words, leaving out examples, minor details, and your own opinion.

Five steps

  1. Read the whole passage before writing anything
  2. Identify the main idea and the key supporting points
  3. Remove examples, statistics, and minor detail
  4. Rewrite the key points in your own words and sentence order
  5. Check that the summary is shorter and free of your own opinion

Try it — build a summary

Click the sentences below that carry a main idea. Skip examples and minor detail. Then generate a draft summary from your selection.

Your draft summary will appear here.
Quoting Paraphrasing Summarizing