#A PARAPHRASE MAY NEED A SIGNAL PHRASE. PROFESSIONAL#

Therefore, being able to correctly and fluently incorporate other writers’ words and ideas in your own writing is a critical writing skill.

#A PARAPHRASE MAY NEED A SIGNAL PHRASE. PROFESSIONAL#

When writing in academic and professional contexts, you are required to engage with the words and ideas of other authors. Now let’s look at each method for incorporating sources in detail. See the difference? Applying this structure when you use direct quotes, paraphrase, or summary will greatly improve the quality of your writing. We have color coded the three elements again so you can better see where they are in the paragraph:

Let’s look at a revised version of the above paragraph that does a better job incorporating a lead-in, a source, and analysis. It is up to you to be as explicit as possible by connecting your sources to your argument. It is not the reader’s job to interpret your writing for you. Students often mistakenly assume that their readers will figure out the relevance on their own, but that is not the case. 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. We do have some lead-in for the quotes, but almost no analysis is given. Ultimately, the student didn’t incorporate all three elements for integrating sources that are recommended in the above video. 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. The most obvious is that the paragraph is almost exclusively direct quotes. As we can see, the concept of communication is much more deep and involved than most people think.Ī couple of things should stand out. Instead, she defines communication as “less like a process of information exchange than it is like a process of negotiation, which almost always involves the interplay of assumptions, values, ethics, public or professional status, self-definition, personal feelings, and social needs” (MacLennan, 2009, p. “While it may be easy to visualize and understand, this model of communication is ultimately inadequate, since it implies that communication is little more than an exchange of information” (MacLennan, 2009, p. She goes on to say that this definition is not comprehensive enough. “Most people, when asked to define communication, would produce something like the following definition: ‘the transmission of information by speaking, writing, and other means'” (p. MacLennan (2009) explains that people tend to define communication incorrectly.

People often have an inaccurate definition of communication.

A paraphrase may need a signal phrase.