Quote, paraphrase, summarise — and cite in APA

Three ways to use a source, one rule

Every time a sentence in your memo rests on someone else's work, you have three choices. Quote it — reproduce the words exactly, in quotation marks. Paraphrase it — restate one passage in your own words at about the same length. Summarise it — compress a section or a whole document to its point. The rule that governs all three is the same: each needs a citation. The difference is only in what else it needs: a quotation also needs quotation marks and a locator (a page or paragraph number), because the reader must be able to find the exact words. A paraphrase or summary needs neither marks nor a page — but it still needs the author and year, because the idea is not yours.

The failure this lesson exists to prevent has a name: patchwriting — taking a source's sentence, swapping a few words, and presenting it uncited as your own. It feels like paraphrase. It is plagiarism, because a paraphrase without a citation is plagiarism whatever the wording.

Worked example — one sentence, three ways

Suppose a 2025 report by an invented consultancy, Northbridge Analytics, says on page 4 that small Ontario printers with a single production press lose on average eleven days of output a year to unplanned downtime. You are writing the stage-2 issues section for the Lakeshore Print case.

Quoted — exact words, marks, page:

> Northbridge Analytics (2025) found that single-press printers "lose on average eleven days of output a year to unplanned downtime" (p. 4).

Paraphrased — your words, same idea, author and year:

> Unplanned press failures cost a typical one-press Ontario printer around eleven working days each year (Northbridge Analytics, 2025).

Summarised — the report's point in one clause, author and year:

> Industry data show that downtime, not print quality, is the main operational risk for single-press shops (Northbridge Analytics, 2025).

All three carry the citation. Only the first carries quotation marks and a page. Now the reference-list entry, which every in-text citation must point to:

> Northbridge Analytics. (2025). Downtime and capacity in Ontario commercial printing. Northbridge Analytics. https://example.org/northbridge-2025

That is the APA shape for a report with an organisation as author: author, (year), title in italics, publisher, URL. When the author and publisher are the same organisation, APA 7 keeps the author and drops the repeated publisher — so a strictly formatted entry omits the second "Northbridge Analytics"; the version above shows all four slots so you can see them.

The two-way rule

Every in-text citation must have a reference-list entry, and every reference-list entry must be cited in the text. A list entry nobody cited is padding; an in-text citation with no entry is a source the reader cannot check. Both are marked down. A URL-only reference ("https://…") fails the shape entirely: no author, no year, no title means the reader cannot tell what it is or how old it is.

Write the in-text citation for a second source

A book by an author with the surname Okonkwo, published 2023, where you paraphrase a claim from chapter 3: (Okonkwo, 2023) — no page, because it is a paraphrase. If instead you quote a sentence from page 112: (Okonkwo, 2023, p. 112). Two authors: (Okonkwo & Byrne, 2023). Three or more: (Okonkwo et al., 2023). If the author's name is part of your sentence, only the year goes in brackets: Okonkwo (2023) argues that….

Images and data

A chart pulled from a report is a quotation of a figure: it needs a caption that credits the source ("Figure 2. Adapted from Northbridge Analytics, 2025, p. 6") and, if the memo is going outside your organisation, permission where the licence requires it. Data reused in your own chart is a paraphrase of the data: cite the source under the chart. Neither is optional, and the group memo is where this most often goes wrong — one member pastes, the group ships, and every name on the cover page owns it.