How to quote

Even when writing forum posts, I encourage students to following APA standards in order to build their academic writing skills. I have written about this before (here), but it is always worth a review. I remind them that, if a paraphrase, a citation needs two components, (Author, date); and if a quote, four; "" (Author, date, p. x). 

• Paraphrase: (Author, date). This is because the paraphrase may summarise a range of things the author has said throughout the document. We take the essence of the original author's idea, and convey it in our own words. This is done 90-95% of the time in academic writing.
• Quote: "what is being cited in double speech marks" (Author, date, p. x). We point exactly to where we are using something which appears, unchanged, in the document. This pattern applies to equally to images, models, tables, graphs, and words. We use double quote marks to clearly show that we are using the expert's words, not our own. Quoting is used like seasoning: lightly, to emphasise just those key points we could not have put better ourselves.

A student had written the following in their post:

There were a few new words that I came across, the one I have chosen is an Intrapreneur. It is a person who works within and established business and encourages the business to take risks in an effort to solve a given problem or create innovative practices or services (p 16)

This post lacks (Author, date), so we know which source this material is being drawn from. It also lacks indicating that these are the exact words of the original author from the point "...is a person..." to the end of the sentence. While a quote had been implied from the page number, it needs the quote marks in order to be explicitly the words of the original author. To be honourable; to show where we are drawing on the words of an expert; and to follow APA rules, even in a relatively informal blog post; we would format the post as follows:

There were a few new words that I came across, the one I have chosen is an Intrapreneur. It "is a person who works within and established business and encourages the business to take risks in an effort to solve a given problem or create innovative practices or services" (APCDA, 2022, p. 16).

Why do we do this? Because we need to clearly flag where we have used other's words. Otherwise we are effectively stealing the original author's ideas and are passing them off as our own.

Honouring other's original ideas is the core of academic writing, to show we are standing on the shoulders of giants; not pretending - however inadvertently - to be the giant.

Sam

References:

APCDA. (2022). APCDA Glossary of Career Development Terms (version 3). Asia-Pacific Career Development Association. https://asiapacificcda.org/resources/Documents/GlossaryProject/APCDA_Glossary_Version_3.pdf