Summarizing

Summarizing

What is summarizing? A summary of a text is a short overview of the main ideas written in your own words. While paraphrasing involves expressing specific ideas or details from a larger text in your own words, we generally summarize whole texts (whether it is an essay,...
Quoting Directly

Quoting Directly

What is quoting? A direct quotation (often referred to as “quotes”) is the exact language taken from source material. Direct quotations match the source material word-for-word and must be contained within quotation marks, usually introduced with a “says” verb or...
Paraphrasing

Paraphrasing

What is paraphrasing? When your professor asks you to paraphrase a text, they are asking you to use your own words to rewrite a passage from another text. Paraphrased material is usually the same length or shorter than the original source material, and it is important...

Sentence Structures

Sentences convey ideas and how they are related. They may have multiple ideas and relationships, so different structures help to separate a sentence’s information. Descriptions Examples Word order is a language’s mostly fixed sequence for ideas and relationships,...

Word Choice & Word Form

Word choice and word form indicate a writer’s familiarity and their intended reader’s familiarity in a context by following systematic rules and idiosyncratic rules. Descriptions Examples Fixed phrases are word combinations that appear together in high frequency in a...