Write: a brief Summary(100-150 words) for the article below

Secondary Sources

When using secondary sources in your project, you may wish to use direct quotations, paraphrase, or summarize the information. Don't forget that whichever method you choose, you still need acitation, both in-text and in your reference list.

Let's look at how some of our Ball Point contest winners use secondary sources to explain their sources. For the full sample projects, see our sample projects page.

Summarizing

When you summarize a source, you give a brief overview of the piece as a whole. Summaries etc should be in your own words. You should use summarizing when you want to give a general overview of a topic or source. Be sure to follow up a summary with an in-text citation. For MLA, you will need the author and the page number or page range. In APA, you will need the author and the year.

Here's how student author Miranda Minnick summarized the overall purpose of one of the studies she read for her research:

The purpose of the study was to look at the aging population in New York City and come up with ways that the community could increase its accessibility to its residents in a variety of ways. Four main aspects were focused on including goods, services, housing, and public right-of-way.

You may be asking where the citation for this source is located. The sentence before the selection here uses an attributive tag, or signal phraseto explain that the study was from a dissertation by Mariana Rich Rena. We'll talk more about attributive tags later in this chapter.

Paraphrasing

Paraphrasing is taking something specific from a source and putting it in your own words. To do this, you need to change both the structure and the wording of the sentence. Donot simply replace words in the sentence with new words by using a thesaurus. Also, be sure that you keep the meaning of the sentence. You may end up with a few phrases that are similar to the original text, but if you type your new sentence into google and find that source immediately, you have not paraphrased effectively.

Minnick used an infographic from the Center for Disease Control (CDC) that states:

• 13.7 percent of people with a disability have a mobility disability with serious difficulty walking or climbing stairs.

There is nothing about this sentence that particularly needs to be quoted exactly, but the figure is important. So, Minnick chose to paraphrase it.

According to an infographic from the CDC (2019), 13.7% of adults have some form of a mobility disease, impacting their ability to walk and climb stairs (para. 4).

This source was from an organization, not an author, so Minnick used that name in her attributive tag. You'll notice that Minnick changed some words here. She might have also gone a step further to change the order of climb stairs and walk.

Paraphrases do require an in-text citation. Since this source did not have page numbers, Minnick used a paragraph number in parenthesis at the end of the sentence. This way the reader can find the exact information easily if they look up your original source.

Quoting

Quoting secondary sources should be reserved for special occasions, and it is rarely used at all in social science or sciencewriting. You should use direct quotes when you need to refer to exactly how an author said something. For example, you may need the specific definition an author used, or you might quote to analyze the rhetorical approach an author used in their writing. You may also quote wording that is particularly technical or detailed when those details are important to your own project. Be sure to use quotation marks!

Minnick used direct quotes when defining the American Disability Act.

According to the ADA National Network (2018), "The ADA is a civil rights law. It was designed to make sure that people with disabilities have equal access to work, education, and their community" (para. 1).

Notice, again, that the author started her sentence with an attributive tag. Again, there is a page, or in this case paragraph, number is at the end of the sentences in an in-text citation and that the punctuation for the sentence goes after the citation.

Block quotes are quotes that are more than four lines or 40 words of text. These should be used especially sparingly in your writing.

Here another student writer, Virgina Carter uses a block quote to give a longer quote that is a list of key issues for the project "What Remains: A Museum's Responsibility to the Living and the Dead."

According to NAGPRA critic D. S. Pensley (2005), NAGPRA aimed to address four key issues:

1. Museums' failure to accurately and respectfully present Native American culture.

2. Museums' possession and public display of Indigenous human remains

3. The display of culturally sensitive artifacts in exhibits and collections

4. The often-violent tactics with which museums have acquired these materials (p. 37).

In this case, the quote is indented and the page number comes after the punctuation for the sentence. Be sure to look up the specifics on how to format block quotes in the citation style you are using for your project.

Combining Quotation and Paraphrase

Often you can effectively combine paraphrase and quotation to make a quote fit smoothly with your own writing. This technique can help you when you want to keep part of the author's words, but you don't want a lengthy quote in your paper.

Maggie Kleihenz used this technique in her sample paper, "Otaku Culture and its Impact." Here she paraphrases part of her source but also uses a specific quote with some language she wanted to keep exactly the way it was written.

Because of this need to collect everything they can related to their favorite things, "popular entertainment naturally began targeting the otaku population that didn't hesitate to open their wallets" (Martin, 2018).

Combining quotation and paraphrase can make your writing more concise and coherent and allow you to smoothly move from your own words to those of a source.

Synthesizing Multiple Sources

Did you know that you can sometimes use multiple sources in the same paragraph or even the same sentence? One of the functions of in-text citations is to show when you transition from using one source to using another source. Attributive tags, or signal phrases, can be very helpful for this purpose, too.

Often sentences like this appear in topic sentences or conclusions that bring together multiple sources and show consensus. In this case, you might have more than one source in your parenthetical citation, like so:

(Carter, Weithorn, & Behrman, 1999; Hornor, 2005; Osofsky, 1999; Zerk, Mertin, & Proeve, 2009).

You may also use attributive tags to show how multiple sources interact with the same point. For example, Dr. Jennifer Grouling used this sentence in her MA thesis to show how two sources had different opinions on the impact of role-playing games:

Although Gumprez (2001) states that role-playing games "help build social skills among children" (p. 10), Juul (2005) argues that "young adults get lost in a world of fantasy from which it is difficult to return" (p. 300).

Notice how the page numbers for each source come after the quote from that source, so it is very clear who said what.