When should I paraphrase instead of quoting directly?
Answer
In academic or critical writing assessment tasks, it is often better to paraphrase than to quote a large chunk of text. Paraphrasing demonstrates that you understand the text you are quoting from and what it is about and that you are able to apply that understanding to developing your argument, rather than simply showing you know how to locate and copy quotes from a text.
A quote is suitable when the task requires you to analyse a text and the original wording of the text itself might be important.
You need to reference both quoted and paraphrased text. For information on referencing, see the Library's Referencing: Getting started guide.
For more information on paraphrasing see our paraphrasing resource.