Paraphrase
Restating someone's words in your own — credit still required, quotation marks not.
To paraphrase is to restate someone else's idea in your own words. The thought belongs to the original author and must be credited; the words belong to you and do not take quotation marks.
Paraphrase is essential because not every passage worth referencing is worth quoting in full. A long argument can often be summarised in two sentences without losing the point, and the result reads more cleanly than a wall of indented quotation.
The ethical rule is the same as for direct quotation: credit the source. The technical rule is to make the wording genuinely your own — minor word swaps do not turn a quotation into a paraphrase. The cleanest test is to read the original, set it aside, and write the idea from memory.
“Absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
Keep reading the glossary
A passage repeated verbatim from a written or spoken source, with attribution.
A formal reference that lets a reader locate the source of a quote.
Reproducing a quote with the wording changed — even if the source is correct.
The act of naming the original speaker or writer of a quote.