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Summarizing, Paraphrasing, and Quoting
“What happened?” asks your parent, pointing at the ruined front wheel of your bike. “Well, it’s a long story,” you reply. But your parent wants the short version, so you summarize.
Summarizing is taking a lot of information and boiling it down to its core ideas. In life, you may summarize events in response to a parent. In research, you summarize to tell readers about key ideas from a longer text.
Summarizing is an important research strategy, along with paraphrasing (putting other people’s ideas in your own words) and quoting (including someone else’s exact words). This chapter will help you decide which strategy to use and how to use it.