Evidence is generally factual and inarguable information that can be used to support and develop an argument. Typically, the type and scope of your argument will dictate which evidence you should use. The most commonly used types of evidence are outlined below:
Using Sources Infographic Transcript
A summary is a brief, general restatement of a text’s central argument and main supporting points.
Typically, you summarize a text to provide your reader with a holistic understanding of a source. Summary is often important to include in certain types of writing that grapple with one source or text throughout, like a literary analysis or a book review. Therefore, it can be helpful to include a summary at the beginning of your essay to provide your reader with important context and background information.
Usually, summary is reserved for capturing an extensive amount of source material. You can summarize several pages, chapters, or an entire text, depending on how much of the source material you want your reader to understand.
To summarize well, you need to have read a large portion of the source material so that you can explain it generally enough in your paper. When reading, it’s important to identify the source’s central argument by locating the thesis statement. Thesis statements typically appear towards the end of an introductory paragraph, section, or chapter, depending on the length of the text.
Next, you can identify supporting points in important paragraphs, sections, or chapters. Look for topic sentences to get a stronger understanding of the larger, more significant ideas to include in your summary. If it’s helpful to your reader, you can also describe the organization or structure of the source and incorporate any key examples or pieces of evidence.
A summary is typically much shorter than the original source. For instance, you could compose a paragraph or a page of summary for several pages or chapters of a source, or even the source in its entirety. Keep in mind that a summary should be short and proportional to the rest of your essay. If your summary is too short, your reader might not have enough information to understand the source within the context of your essay. On the other hand, if you include too much information, your summary might be too lengthy and detailed, and there might not be enough space left in your essay to sufficiently analyze, evaluate, or critique the source.
Note: This section covers the basics of using paraphrase as evidence in your essay. For more detailed information on how to paraphrase, please see our “Paraphrasing” webpage.
Generally, you paraphrase source material when you need to do the following:
Oftentimes, paraphrased source material serves as evidence within a body paragraph of your essay. While evidence can serve multiple functions in a paragraph, paraphrased information is most often used to support a claim in your essay or to illustrate a point.
Generally, you should paraphrase a specific section of source material that is relevant to your argument and that you want the reader to understand well. In other words, a text in its entirety might not be relevant to your paper, but maybe the author addresses your topic tangentially. If you want to use the relevant parts of a text but not the entire thing, then select a few sentences or a paragraph to paraphrase for your essay.
When paraphrasing, you should focus on accurately representing the following things:
When should I quote a source, as opposed to summarizing or paraphrasing it?
Direct quotation is rarely used in academic writing, especially in APA style, because your essay should focus on your own ideas and writing, not the words of other authors. There are exceptions to this, depending on the field you are writing for. In the humanities, scholars often critically engage with individual texts, so direct quotation is more acceptable in disciplines like art history, literature, philosophy, etc.
Outside of the humanities, paraphrasing is generally preferred over direct quotation because paraphrasing requires you to understand source material well enough to put it into your own words. Avoid direct quotation with the exception of the following circumstances:
If you do need to include a direct quotation in your writing, keep the length of the quotation to a minimum. You can quote specific words, phrases, or even sentences, but try to avoid using block quotations, which are 40 words or longer.