The goal of this exercise is to recognise and practise the difference between several ways that you will use bits and pieces of the articles and books you read for this course (and beyond). You will practise citing, identifying, quoting, rewriting, paraphrasing, and summarising. You may be more or less familiar with these, and this exercise is a way to check your comfort level and figure out where you might need more training or practise. This is not a comprehensive lesson on these different skills, and you can find more resources under “Writing Resources” on the Assessment page of the course website. Your course tutor can also help you understand these important skills.

Any article or book from the Resource List for this week (or last week) should work. Just pick something that looks interesting! Identify a paragraph to focus on for this exercise.

An example from Daston and Park’s book Wonders and the Order of Nature appears in this font as we go. Here is a paragraph from p. 14 in the book’s Introduction:

Write out the text’s full citation as it would appear in a bibliography or source list. There are automated tools from article websites or citation managers that can get you started on this, but you still need to check that the author, title, and other information appear completely and correctly. For example, the automated citation text for Daston and Park from the ebook website leaves out one of the authors! The most common automated error I see in submissions is a missing date, where the citation tool has written “N.D.” for “no date” when the date can be found by looking at the source. It can also be good practise to write these out by hand. A full citation includes the author(s), year, title, and source (publisher if a book, journal and volume/issue/page numbers if an article). Some citation formats include more details or use different abbreviations, orders, or punctuation. Use any format that is comfortable for you that includes all of the essential information.

Daston, Lorraine and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750. Zone Books, 1998.

Before we can use a text, we have to figure out what it is about. Make two lists or outlines (or other format that works for you), one for the most important subjects (people, places, topics) of the paragraph and one for the most important claims the paragraph makes. You may have to look at some of the text near the paragraph to figure out what it is about.

Subjects: naturalists, Europe between 1150-1750 (Medieval and early modern), wonders, preternatural vs natural views of nature.

Claims: there is a distinction between the focus of medieval and early modern vs later naturalists and their corresponding ideas of nature:

Medieval / Early Modern

• Nature follows customs with exceptions (= miracles)
• Nature gets strange at the margins of the known world
• Focus on wonders/preternatural

Later (from late 17th century)

• Nature follows laws
• Nature is the same everywhere
• Focus on regularities/natural

Quotations directly take a source’s words and incorporate them into our own writing. They should be used only when it matters exactly how the source says something, not just what it says. Showing appreciation for the source’s wording or thinking their wording is better than how you would write it are not usually very good reasons to use quotations in academic writing. Since quotations do not directly show your own understanding of the source, which is the goal of university assessments, they should be kept to a minimum in these.

However, you should still know how to quote effectively, including correct citations. Always enclose the quoted words in inverted commas (“[words]” or ‘[words]’ – the “double” form is preferred in the School of Social and Political Science but you will probably encounter both in your reading) and always cite the exact page where the words occur in the original text. Finally, quotations need to be embedded in a context in your writing, not presented as free-floating words. Choose a short but significant phrase from your paragraph and write out a quotation, including a correct citation.

Earlier and later views of nature differed over whether the world was “highly ordered” but not “homogeneous over space and time” or whether it was “everywhere and always the same” (Daston and Park 1998, 14).

You often hear that your writing should be “in your own words” but what does this actually mean? It is possible to use different words and phrases while still essentially reproducing your source’s writing. If you use your source text as a starting point and then modify it by substituting words and moving phrases around bit by bit, this is called patch writing. While patch writing can be a helpful way to practise writing, it does not really demonstrate your understanding of the original text and should not be used for course submissions. When patch writing appears in academic work it is sometimes considered dishonest because you are presenting as your own another person’s way of explaining something, even if you are not using the identical words.

Take the first few sentences of your paragraph and rewrite them by changing the wording one piece at a time. Even though this is not the kind of writing you should submit for assignments, you should still practise giving credit with a proper citation at the end!

By understanding naturalists’ use of wonders across about 600 years to map the most distant parts of nature, we see how many ways they understood the parts closer to home. Naturalists in the medieval and early modern periods talked about patterns in the customs of nature, not laws of nature, and including both miracles and marvels. Their view of nature was very orderly, but was not completely uniform (Daston and Park 1998, 14).

So how can you use a source while writing with your own words and explaining things in your own way? Paraphrasing is a way of presenting the facts and ideas of your source that demonstrates your understanding of those facts and ideas, not just your ability to rewrite the source’s explanation. Paraphrased text is often shorter than the source text, and explains the points from the source text that you would like to use in your writing. It should be self-contained, including all the information you need from the source. You probably won’t capture every last aspect of your source text, but that is okay! The point is expressing the points that matter for your writing as you understand them.

A good rule of thumb is that you should be able to write this without looking at the source as you go. If you cannot write out an initial paraphrase of a source with the source hidden, it is possible you have not yet understood the source well enough yet, and paraphrasing is a great way to check your understanding! Because the goal of your assessments is to demonstrate your understanding, paraphrasing is one of the main ingredients in the writing you will be submitting in this course for your portfolio.

Paraphrase the major points of your chosen paragraph, making sure to cover each of the points from your identification (step 2). Remember to include an appropriate citation.

Basic assumptions about how nature was ordered changed dramatically over the period of 1150-1750. Until the mid-seventeenth century, naturalists saw nature as variable but following general patterns, with stranger phenomena occurring more often as one moved farther from familiar places. Accordingly, these naturalists focused on wondrous or preternatural things in their study of nature. By contrast, later naturalists saw nature as essentially uniform and did not treat wonders as a special kind of evidence about natural order (Daston and Park 1998, 14).

Note: the appropriate frequency of citation depends on the writing context. If it is clear that the entire passage is a paraphrase of the source cited at the end, one citation suffices. If you mix paraphrase with analysis or integrate multiple sources, you will probably cite things more often. If in doubt, cite more.

Finally, sometimes you need to refer to claims and ideas without explaining them in full. A summary shows how a source relates to what you are writing so that a reader will know what they will find if they go to that source and will see how that source supports your analysis. Often it involves condensing the main points of the source to just the aspects needed for your writing. Consider the distinction between these ways of writing about an imaginary source describing a cat:

• source: “To characterise the cat, I would think first of the tufts of bright green fur that graced its paws, how they drew the eye to the yellow spots and patches that interrupted stripes of snow and sepia that shone in the morning sun.” C.A. Katz, A Cat In the Sun (Imagined Books, 2019).
• paraphrase: The cat had brown and white stripes with yellow patches, and green fur around its feet (Katz 2019, 25).
• summary (end-citation): The cat had a distinctive colour and pattern to its fur (Katz 2019, 25).
• summary (integrated citation): Katz (2019, 25) describes the cat’s appearance.

If you are writing about the cat’s appearance, a paraphrase extracts the key information in a way that substitutes for the source for the purposes of your writing. The summary, by contrast, tells you what you will find in the source and how it fits into your writing, without including all the relevant information from the source in the summary itself.

Summarise your chosen paragraph, making sure to use an appropriate form of citation.

Daston and Park (1998, 14) characterise the distinction between earlier and later views of the order of nature, which transitioned in the latter half of the seventeenth century from an assumption of irregularity and emphasis on wonders to an assumption of regularity that accounted for all of nature within the same rigid rules.

Note: this summary describes what the reader would find in Daston and Park’s paragraph and extracts some of the key supporting claims, but the summary does not stand in for the paragraph in the way the paraphrase might. The difference between summary and paraphrase is a bit subtle for this kind of short example, but is clearer for longer texts. The key difference to keep in mind is that a paraphrase stands in for the relevant bit of the source more or less in full, whereas a summary involves selection and condensation and is usually not self-contained.