Wednesday, October 3, 2012

Attribution Quiz: Paraphrases vs. Quotes

Many of you stumbled on this example:

"People think we make $3 million or $5 million a year." They don't realize most athletes make only $500,000, the ballplayer said.

What some of you did was change the second part of that statement into a quote. But it was not a quote. It was a paraphrase. Turning it into a quote was inaccurate. What you should have done was package a quote and paraphrase together, along something like these lines:

"People think we make $3 million or $5 million a year" and don't realize most athletes make only $500,000, the ballplayer said.Bold
Be sure not to confuse quotes with paraphrases.

Plus, DO NOT change the literal words within a quote, meaning anything that can change the meaning of a quote. For example, you can't change "gotta" to "got to," because it changes what was literally said.

Quotes are the literal truth within our stories, and you can't change the truth. But you can change paraphrases, as long as it is still contextually correct.

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