AQA 7042 · C3.19 - Quotation, paraphrase and writing in your own words
Learn how to use short quotations and genuine paraphrases, acknowledge their sources, and keep the reasoning and wording of a Historical Investigation your own. Supplied fictional text lets you practise without rewriting any live assessed work.
Three source-use moves
Historical writing usually moves among three different kinds of sentence. Keeping them distinct makes authorship visible.
| Move | What the writer does | What the reader must be able to see |
|---|---|---|
| Short quotation | Reproduces a few exact words because their wording matters. | Quotation marks and a precise acknowledgement of the source and location. |
| Paraphrase | Restates a source's particular idea accurately in a genuinely new sentence structure and vocabulary. | Acknowledgement of the source, because the idea still came from someone else. |
| The student's own reasoning | Explains, tests, connects or judges material through the student's own historical thinking. | A clear reasoning chain; references remain attached to any source-derived claims or evidence being discussed. |
Paraphrase
An accurate restatement of a source's meaning in a genuinely new form. A paraphrase is not made original merely by replacing a few words, and it still needs acknowledgement.
"In your own words" therefore does not mean pretending that borrowed ideas originated with you. It means that another writer supplies identifiable material while you retain responsibility for selecting, understanding and reasoning with it.
Quote only what matters
Use a direct quotation when the source's exact choice of words is itself useful to the analysis. Keep it short, reproduce it accurately, mark its boundaries clearly and attach the locator required by your centre's referencing system. A quotation never explains its own significance: the student's surrounding sentence must say what the wording shows and how it bears on the historical issue.
The following practice interpretation is NovaLearn-authored and wholly fictional. Its invented writer, title and page must never appear in a real Investigation or bibliography.
Fictional practice interpretation
Dr Lina Ross, Markets and Memory in Bellford (imaginary publication, 2024), fictional p. 42: "The memorial campaign succeeded less because opinion changed than because its organisers learned to work through the town council."
A defensible short use would be:
Ross gives greater weight to strategy than to changing opinion, emphasising that the organisers "learned to work through the town council" (Ross, 2024, fictional p. 42).
The borrowed words are visible and brief. More importantly, the student's opening clause identifies the interpretation's causal weighting. Copying the whole fictional sentence would add length but no independent reasoning.
Choose quoted words for their analytical value, not to avoid explaining an idea in your own prose. If the exact wording is not important, an accurate paraphrase will usually produce a clearer sentence.
AQA warns that extensive verbatim copying can lead to malpractice. Accurate references make borrowing visible, but they do not turn long copied passages into the student's own historical reasoning and writing.
Paraphrase meaning, not the surface
Begin by identifying the source's meaning. In Ross's fictional sentence, the central claim is comparative: institutional strategy mattered more than a change in public opinion. Any paraphrase must preserve that weighting.
| Version | Diagnosis |
|---|---|
| The campaign worked less because views changed and more because leaders learnt to use the council. | Patchwriting: the order and verbal pattern remain very close to the source, despite synonym changes. |
| Ross argues that success depended chiefly on the organisers' new use of municipal politics rather than on converting the public (Ross, 2024, fictional p. 42). | Accurate paraphrase: the sentence has been reconstructed around the causal comparison, and the source is acknowledged. |
| Ross argues that growing public support was the main reason for success (Ross, 2024, fictional p. 42). | Distortion: the wording is new, but the source's comparative claim has been reversed. |
A useful personal routine is:
- read enough context to understand the complete claim;
- identify its subject, relationship and any qualification or weighting;
- look away from the wording and reconstruct that meaning yourself;
- compare your sentence with the source for accidental closeness or distortion; and
- add the precise acknowledgement required by your centre.
This routine is for the student to perform. Sending a passage from a live Investigation to another person or an AI tool for rewriting would surrender the very authorship the routine is meant to protect.
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