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At the end of the lesson, you will understand how and when to use an indirect quotation and give credit to its source.
You learned in the Direct Quotations section that direct quotations should be used sparingly and for a specific purpose. If you want to convey an author’s words or idea without a direct quotation, you can use an indirect quotation through paraphrasing. Remember from what you learned in the Plagiarism section, that paraphrasing means you retell or rewrite a text, using your own words. The following video will guide you through some examples. You may want to pause the video and try to paraphrase the direct quotation yourself, and then check how your work compares to the speaker’s paraphrased text.
Although direct quotations are a good way to help you report other people’s ideas without plagiarizing, they should be short and appear infrequently. As instructors, we’ve all seen essays with a specific, personal writing style, which suddenly changes because the student is using another person’s words. The most widely accepted and effective way to transfer a writer’s ideas into your text is by using “indirect quotations”. Indirect quotations is paraphrased with an added citation. Citation rules are similar to those that apply to direct quotations. Let’s look at an example. The presentation in the video is here.
“Spirituality and religiosity have been found to be positive predictors of subjective well-being, even if results are not altogether consistent across studies.” (Vilani et al., 2019). – This is a direct quotation. If we were to paraphrase, the sentence could look like this:
Some studies have shown that there is a positive correlation between spirituality, religiosity, and the sense of general well-being in individuals. (Vilani et al. 2019)
The citation following the part that it paraphrased is the same as the one used in direct quotations. So we have parenthesis + last name of the first author and, because the article has more than two authors, the phrase et al. follows. Finally, there is the year of publication. Here is another example, also from your previous lesson on direct quotations:
The university’s career advisors “ foster partnerships with employers, faculty, staff, administrators, and the greater community”(https://new.paragoniu.edu.kh/current-students/student-services/).
This can be paraphrased to look something like this:
All career advisors at Paragon university are connected to prospective employers, faculty, and academic staff. In addition, they have ties to the greater community (https://new.paragoniu.edu.kh/current-students/student-services/).
For a more comprehensive look at the APA referencing system for in-text citations, you can visit the APA official site. Learning the format of in text citations is simple and straightforward. The most important but challenging part is of course paraphrasing the content.
In this course we will only cover in text citations and not referencing, which appears in the end of your essay or report. The reason is that there are a few reliable websites that will automatically generate an APA style reference for you, such as this one.
Answer the question below to check your understanding of today’s lesson.
Fill int he blanks with the correct word.
