Undergraduate or graduate students from any area of knowledge have a recurring difficulty when it comes to citing their academic work. Aside from the need to follow the famous rules, there is invariably little attention to how to quote or paraphrase without infringing copyright.
Let us fix the following premise before explaining what a quote is and giving an example of how to use this resource without crossing the legality frontier: the copyright, although exclusive, is not absolute. The law imposed limitations on its exercise. One of these limitations is precisely the possibility for anyone to use the author’s words, their composition for the purpose of study or criticism.
There are basically two types of quotation. The first is the direct quotation, the one that the student uses quotation marks, literally transcribes the author’s words, pulls out a footnote and indicates the name, the title, the publisher and the year of publication of the work.
The second form of quotation is called indirect quotation. The student does not use quotation marks, reads what the author said, understands the content and makes a paraphrase. The note remains mandatory.
The choice of the type of quotation depends on the style of each student. There is no rule for this. The preference of advisors and evaluators is for indirect citation. The text becomes more fluid and clean.
The text originally written in another language has, a priori , the same protection afforded to Brazilians. The same citation rules apply to foreign and translated texts. In the latter, the mention of the translator’s name is also mandatory, because there is an intellectual creation in the translation.
Returning to the indirect quotation, the good and legal paraphrase involves reading, understanding and expression. There is, in paraphrase, a creative intellectual effort to rewrite, giving a different form, to a content or idea put by another author. One solution is to rewrite a text online.
