MLA: Quoting vs Paraphrasing
Quoting and Paraphrasing in MLA
When you use sources in your paper, you will likely do a lot of paraphrasing. Often you will summarize, which means you will take longer pieces of information you learned from your research and put in your own words in order to explain it to your reader. If you are able to successfully put things in your own words, it shows your instructor that you understand the information that you are writing about. When you summarize and paraphrase, YOU MUST USE CITATIONS.
Some tips for paraphrasing:
- Read your information and highlight the things you think are important and want to include in your paper.
- You can print out your source and use a highlighter or use the highlighter function on your PDF or textbook viewer.
- Without looking at what you highlighted, write down notes of what you remembered.
- Try recording yourself talking about what you read. Pretend you are explaining what you learned to a friend, and record yourself. Then go back and take notes on what you said.
- When you explain things out loud it forces your brain to think about your source different than when you read and retype something.
Changing just a few words around IS NOT paraphrasing.
Quoting is when you take a bit of information from your source and you use it word for word. When you use quotes, you need to use quotation marks to show which pieces of information are directly from your source. If your quote is at the end of a sentence, the period will go after your in-text citation. See the example below.
According to the MLA Handbook, quoting should not make up large portions of your paper and "should not be used as a substitution for paraphrasing ideas you do not fully understand" (100).
Quotes are best when they are short and used sparingly. However, if you must include a longer quote this is done differently. A quote that is more than four lines long is called a block quotation. When you use a block quotation, the whole quotation is indented and you do not have to use quotation marks.
The screenshot below shows a block quote from one of the sample MLA papers.
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