1st Year Integrating Sources Quiz

This quiz is designed to introduce some of the key points about paraphrasing and direct quotes in your essays. These skills will help you with academic practice, and your writing skills, helping your points to come across as clearly and accurately as possible. You can retake this quiz as many times as you like and can revisit it as often as needed over the course of your degree.

1. What are the key differences between a direct quote and a paraphrase?

A direct quote should use quotation marks. A paraphrase mixes up the historian’s words with your own.

A direct quote should only be used when using a whole sentence of the source. A paraphrase should only be used to summarise a whole chapter or book.

A direct quote should use quotation marks and the exact same wording as the original. A paraphrase uses different wording to summarise the historian’s point.

2. Select the answer which best describes how the following sentence uses material from another historian:

In the Norosibirsk regional camps and colonies, for example, officials were informed that in July deaths from tuberculosis were as high as 73.2%.^[1]
^[1] Golfo Alexopoulos, Illness and Inhumanity in Stalin’s Gulag (New Haven, 2017), p. 96.

A direct quote.

A paraphrase.

3. When should we use a reference?

After we have finished the paragraph.

Only when we use a direct quote from a source.

At the end of the sentence, after we have direct quoted from, or paraphrased, a source.

Only when we paraphrase a source.

To prove that a well-known event occurred.

4. Why is it important to ensure the wording and formatting of a direct quote is the same as in the original text? (select all that apply)

So you do not misrepresent other people’s work.

So you do not make your essay look too chatty and informal.

So you do not accidentally quote a full paragraph rather than writing your own.

So you do not plagiarise by failing to acknowledge which words are theirs, and which are yours.

5. Imagine you are using this extract in an essay:

‘The discussion has been made even more complex for historians who spend most of their time reading U.S. scholars by the ubiquitous reference to race as if it did not have a particular national history in the United States’. Look carefully – which of these direct quotes is accurate?

Berg, Schor and Soto point out that race has ‘a particular national history in the United States’ ...

Berg, Schor and Soto point out that U.S. scholars make ‘ubiquitous references to race like it didn’t have a specific national history in the United States’, ...

Berg, Schor and Soto point out that race has a particular ‘national history’ in the United States, …

6. Do we need to insert a reference after this sentence, and why?

‘Those campaigning for the transfer of power in India from the East India Company to the British Crown argued the rebellion of 1857 made it clear that Company rule was hindering attempts to modernise and civilise the subcontinent.’

No, we have not directly quoted a specific historian’s work or primary source.

Yes, we’ve made a claim which needs supporting with evidence from either primary sources or secondary literature.

No, we have not directly quoted or paraphrased a historian’s argument or primary source.

Yes, because every sentence should be followed by a reference.

No, because this information is well-established and easily available to our readers, nothing said here is under contention.

7. Do we need to insert a reference after this sentence, and why?:

On 4 July 1776, representatives from the thirteen American colonies issued the Declaration of Independence from King George III.

No, we have not directly quoted a specific historian’s work or primary source.

Yes, we’ve made a claim which needs supporting with evidence from either primary sources or secondary literature.

No, we have not directly quoted or paraphrased a historian’s argument or primary source.

Yes, because every sentence should be followed by a reference.

No, because this information is well-established and easily available to our readers, nothing said here is under contention.

8. Can we use secondary literature to back up our claims about what happened in the past?

No, all our claims should be based on our own research into the primary sources.

Yes, we should try to do our own research using primary sources, but we may need to provide context or discuss a topic using the research of other historians.

Yes, we should always rely on that secondary literature because it is always correct.

9. Your essay has the following sentence: St Vincent complained that accurately identifying religious affiliation was so difficult ‘in 1412, that “many are thought to be the children of Jews, but are really Christian, and vice versa”.’^[1]
Why might it be important to make sure that our source is quoted using one style of quotation mark e.g. ‘…’ and the source our source is quoting is in a different style of quote mark e.g. “…”?

To overcomplicate our presentation and make it look very academic in a way that builds trust with our reader.

To avoid the primary source being mistaken for our own paraphrase of the historian.

To show we are using a quote within a quote. To avoid misrepresenting the historian’s work by making the difference between our words, their words, and the words in the source they are citing, very clear.

To make it clear that we understand the difference between secondary literature and a primary source.

10. Out of the following scenarios, when might a paraphrase be more useful than a direct quote?

When the historian came up with a pithy phrase to encapsulate their argument, but it makes our writing look bad in comparison.

When the direct quote would be very long and contain lots of information irrelevant to the specific point we are trying to make.

When we didn’t take our notes down very well and cannot remember what was the historian’s words, and what was our own summary.

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(Russian State Archive, Moscow, Moscow (Російський Державний архів, Москва), CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

(Rowland Scherman, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)

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Department of History

1st Year Integrating Sources Quiz

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