We are now officially in the second stage of the report writing process: producing your report!

By now, you should be off to a good start with your formal research report. You have used rhetorical theory to plan out your message and you already have several sources that you want to use. The question we must now address is how you include those sources into your writing in a professional way?

Academic integrity plays a huge role here. You obviously don’t want to copy a source’s research word for word and claim it as your own. That would be plagiarism. However, you also don’t want to only copy large chunks of the text and just put that in your paper either. That would be poor writing. Instead, you want to include a combination of both where you use the work of others to help support your arguments and ideas. This chapter will walk you through how to do this.

Integrating Materials Into Your Report

One of the most important takeaways from the video is that it is not enough to simply present information from your sources in your paper. You must also draw your own conclusions. Otherwise you are simply restating someone else’s work, and you are not furthering your argument. Many students forget this crucial step in writing reports. Thankfully, it’s a relatively easy fix once you know what to do. We will first walk you through the structure you need to follow, and then show you how to use it to incorporate direct quotes, paraphrase, and summary in your report.

The Source Integration Structure

Read the example paragraph below. What is wrong with it?

A couple of things should stand out. The most obvious is that the paragraph is almost exclusively direct quotes. We have a little bit of the student’s input at the start and end of the paragraph, but there isn’t really anything substantial in-between the quotes.

Ultimately, the student didn’t incorporate all three elements for integrating sources that are recommended in the above video. As a reminder they are:

Let’s look at the same paragraph again, but highlight the three elements we have discussed. This will show you visually how the paragraph is arranged. We will use the following colors:

Lead-in

Idea from a Source

Analysis

We do have some lead-in for the quotes, but almost no analysis is given. Yes, the quoted information may be relevant, but it is not immediately clear how it’s relevant to the writer’s main point because there is not enough analysis.

Students often mistakenly assume that their readers will figure out the relevance on their own, but that is not the case. It is not the reader’s job to interpret your writing for you. It is up to you to be as explicit as possible by connecting your sources to your argument.

Let’s look at a revised version of the above paragraph that does a better job incorporating a lead-in, a source, and analysis. We have color coded the three elements again so you can better see where they are in the paragraph:

Direct Quotes, Paraphrasing, and Summary

When writing in academic and professional contexts, you are required to engage with the words and ideas of other authors. Therefore, being able to correctly and fluently incorporate other writers’ words and ideas in your own writing is a critical writing skill. As you now know, there are three main ways to integrate evidence from sources into your writing:

1. direct quotes
2. paraphrasing
3. summary

One important note that we haven’t mentioned is that you are required to include a citation anytime you are using another person’s words and/or ideas. This means that even if you do not quote directly, but paraphrase or summarize source content and express it in your own words, you still must give credit to the original authors for their ideas. Your RCM 200 instructor will be making sure you do this when they read your formal written report. 

You have already seen the use of citations in action throughout this textbook. Anytime we have integrated content from another source, you will have seen a citation that looks something like this:

(Smith, 2020)

These citations are done using the American Psychology Association (APA) style. You will be expected to use this citation style in your own paper. However, if you are not sure how to do APA citation correctly, don’t worry. We will go into the specific mechanics of how to cite sources in the next chapter.

We will now walk you through each source integration method, giving you opportunities to practice each one. If at any point you’re confused, or unclear, don’t hesitate to ask your instructor for help. The University of Saskatchewan Writing Centre is also a great resource.

Direct Quotes

A direct quote is the word-for-word copy of someone else’s words and/or ideas. This is noted by quotation marks (” “) around those words. Using quotations to support your argument has several benefits over paraphrase and summary:

• Integrating quotations provide direct evidence from reliable sources to support your argument
• Using the words of credible sources conveys your credibility by showing you have done research into the area you are writing about and consulted relevant and authoritative sources
• Selecting effective quotations illustrates that you can extract the important aspects of the information and use them effectively in your own argument

However, be careful not to over-quote.  As we saw in the above example, if you over-quote, you risk relying too much on the words of others and not your own.

Quotations should be used sparingly because too many quotations can interfere with the flow of ideas and make it seem like you don’t have ideas of your own.

When should you use quotations?

• If the language of the original source uses the best possible phrasing or imagery, and no paraphrase or summary could be as effective; or
• If the use of language in the quotation is itself the focus of your analysis (e.g., if you are analyzing the author’s use of a particular image, metaphor, or other rhetorical strategy).

How to Integrate Quotations Correctly

Integrating quotations into your writing happens on two levels: the argumentative level and the grammatical level.

The Argumentative Level

At the argumentative level, the quotation is being used to illustrate or support a point that you have made, and you will follow it with some analysis, explanation, comment, or interpretation that ties that quote to your argument.

As we mentioned earlier, this is where many students run into trouble. This is known as a “quote and run.” Never quote and run. This leaves your reader to determine the relevance of the quotation, and they might interpret it differently than you intended! A quotation, statistic or bit of data cannot speak for itself; you must provide context and an explanation for the quotations you use. As long as you use the three steps we listed above for integrating sources, you will be on the right track.

The Grammatical Level

The second level of integration is grammatical. This involves integrating the quotation into your own sentences so that it flows smoothly and fits logically and syntactically. There are three main methods to integrate quotations grammatically:

1. Seamless Integration Method: embed the quoted words as if they were an organic part of your sentence. This means that if you read the sentence aloud, your listeners would not know there was a quotation.
2. Signal Phrase Method: use a signal phrase (Author + Verb) to introduce the quotation, clearly indicating that the quotation comes from a specific source
3. Colon Method: introduce the quotation with a complete sentence ending in a colon.

Let’s see this in action. Consider the following opening sentence (and famous comma splice) from A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens, as an example:

Below are examples of the quote being integrated using the three methods.

1. Seamless Integration: embed the quotation, or excerpts from the quotation, as a seamless part of your sentence

Charles Dickens (2017) begins his novel with the paradoxical observation that the eighteenth century was both “the best of times” and “the worst of times” (p. 5).

2. Signal Phrase: introduce the author and then the quote using a signal verb (scroll down to see a list of common verbs that signal you are about to quote someone)

Describing the eighteenth century, Charles Dickens (2017) observes, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” (p. 5).

3. Colon: if your own introductory words form a complete sentence, you can use a colon to introduce and set off the quotation. This can give the quotation added emphasis.

Dickens (2017) defines the eighteenth century as a time of paradox: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” (p. 5).

The eighteenth century was a time of paradox: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” (Dickens, 2017, p. 5).

It’s important that you not rely on any one grammatical method in your own writing. Instead, try to use a balance of methods to make your writing seem more dynamic and varied.

Editing Quotations

When you use quotation marks around material, this indicates that you have used the exact words of the original author. However, sometimes the text you want to quote will not fit grammatically or clearly into your sentence without making some changes. Perhaps you need to replace a pronoun in the quote with the actual noun to make the context clear, or perhaps the verb tense does not fit. There are two main ways to edit a quotation to make it fit grammatically with your own sentence:

• Use square brackets: to reflect changes or additions to a quote, place square brackets around any words that have been changed or added.
• Use ellipses: ellipses show that some text has been removed. They can have either three dots (. . .) or four dots (. . . .). Three dots indicate that some words have been removed from the sentence; four dots indicate that a substantial amount of text has been deleted, including the period at the end of a sentence.

Let’s look at this in action using the quote below.

You are allowed to change the original words, to shorten the quoted material or integrate material grammatically, but only if you signal those changes appropriately with square brackets or ellipses:

Example 1:  Petroski (2012) observed that “[e]ngineers are always striving for success, but failure is seldom far from their minds” (p. 175).

Example 2:  Petroski (2012) recounts the story of a large bridge that was constructed at the beginning of the twentieth century in Quebec, saying that “by the time [it was done], in 1917, almost ninety construction workers [were] killed in the course of building the $25 million structure” (p. 175)

Example 3:  “Planners expected that when completed the … bridge would set a world record for long-span bridges of all types” (Petroski, 2012, p. 175).

In summary, there are a lot of ways you can approach integrating quotes. You can even change certain elements of your quote as long you indicate this with proper punctuation.

Paraphrase and Summary

Unlike direct quotes, which use a source’s exact wording, paraphrase and summary allow you to use your own words to present information. While the approach to using both methods is similar, the reason you will choose one over the other is different.

A paraphrase is typically more detailed and specific than a summary. It also retains the length of the original source.

A summary, on the other hand, is used when describing an entire source. For example, if you want to emphasize the main ideas of a source, but not go into a great detail, then a summary is usually best.

Paraphrase

As the video states, paraphrasing is when you put source text in your own words and alter the sentence structure to avoid using direct quotes. Paraphrasing is the preferred way of using a source when the original wording isn’t important. This way, you can incorporate the source’s ideas so they’re stylistically consistent with the rest of your document and thus better tailored to the needs of your audience. Also, paraphrasing a source into your own words proves your advanced understanding of the source text. The video lists five steps for paraphrasing a source. They are:

Summary

Summarizing is one of the most important skills in professional communication. Professionals of every field must explain to non-expert customers, managers, and even co-workers the complex concepts on which they are experts, but in a way that those non-experts can understand. Adapting the message to such audiences requires brevity but also translating jargon-heavy technical details into plain, accessible language.

Fortunately, the process for summarizing is very similar to paraphrasing. Like paraphrasing, a summary is putting the original source in your own words. The main difference is that a summary is a fraction of the source length—anywhere from less than 1% to a quarter depending on the source length and length of the summary.

A summary can reduce a whole novel or film to a single-sentence blurb, for instance, or it could reduce a 50-word paragraph to a 15-word sentence. It can be as casual as a spoken overview of a meeting your colleague was absent from, or an elevator pitch selling a project idea to a manager. It can also be as formal as a memo report to your colleagues on a conference you attended on behalf of your organization.

When summarizing, you will follow the same process as a paraphrase, but with a few additional steps:

1. 1. Determine how big your summary should be (according to your audience’s needs) so that you have a sense of how much material you should collect from the source.
   2. Pull out the main points, which can usually be found in places like the summary portion of a report, the introduction, the abstract at the beginning of an article, or a topic sentence at the beginning of a paragraph.
      • Disregard detail such as supporting evidence and examples. These elements belong in a paraphrase, not a summary.
      • How many points you collect depends on how big your summary should be (according to audience needs).

• Don’t forget to cite your summary.

References

Dickens, C. (2017). A tale of two cities. Alma Books Ltd.

Lester, J. D. (1976). Writing research papers: A complete guide. Pearson Scott Foresman.

Petroski, H. (2012). The obligation of an engineer. In To forgive design: Understanding failure (pp. 175-198). Harvard University Press. https://doi.org/10.4159/harvard.9780674065437

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