Your academic writing will be more successful if you mostly use your own words to paraphrase and summarise the ideas of others or if you incorporate brief quotations into your sentences. What you write is your views, supported by information from other sources.
It is useful to use direct quotations when:
However, you must be careful how you use quotations. If you write an assignment by 'stitching together' direct quotes from different sources, you might show that you have gathered a range of ideas relevant to your assignment. You will not show what you have understood about those ideas and the thinking your have done about them. Your writing will lack your distinctive 'voice' and become a collection of other voices.
When you paraphrase, you use the ideas from the text you are reading but put those ideas into your own words. In paraphrasing or summarising, you will of course incorporate key content words from the text into what you write.
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