Should I Quote or Should I Paraphrase?

There is no "right answer" to this question. You can do either. You can decide to do a little of both for the project you are working on. The important thing is to make sure, whenever you use information from a source, that you do one or the other.

We are going to continue using the same book by Ben Thompson that we saw in the in-text citation example. Below is the direct quote that we used for a research paper on the American Revolution:

Direct Quote

The plan worked, and with "just 150 men and only a few gunshots, George Rogers Clark captured from the British the territories that would eventually become the states of Kentucky, Missouri, Ohio, Michigan, and Indiana" (Thompson 245). This added territory would...

In the above example, we brought an idea from Ben Thompson's book into our own writing. Because we used the exact same wording he used, we put that idea in quotes. Here, there is no mistaking which words are mine and which words are Thompson's. Below is the same idea from the same book, but here I have changed both the original words that Thompson used and also his original sentence structure. This is called a paraphrase, and you can see that below:

Paraphrase

The plan worked, and with less than 200 men and very little gunfire George Rogers Clark would go on to win the Northwest Territory from the British (Thompson 245). This Northwest Territory, also known as the Old Northwest, consisted...

In this paraphrase, the writer choses not to use Thompson's original wording because it is only the general idea that interests them, and maybe they want to go on and make a slightly different point. But even though they didn't directly quote Ben Thompson's words, they still have to put an in-text citation at the end of their sentence because they got that piece of information from his book.

Direct quoting and paraphrasing are different ways to bring the sources you've researched into your research projects. It's a great idea to practice both because they will really come in handy as you move into High School research writing. The key thing to remember is that both direct quotes and paraphrases need an in-text citation at the end.

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