Quoting and Paraphrasing Experts and Research

Overview

All informational journalism quotes experts and stakeholders. That’s the journalist’s job — to gather information from a range of sources so that the resulting article is authoritative and balanced.

Page or click through The Times or any other news source and you’ll see. You would of course expect front-page articles about serious issues to reference multiple perspectives the way this one on the coronavirus does, quoting patients, Chinese officials, public health experts and scientists who study virology. But if you check out pieces from sections like Style and Sports, you’ll notice the same. Whether you’re reading a piece on social-media influencers or skateboarding, you’ll see that the writer has included a range of points of view.

If you’re writing your own piece, perhaps for our contest, you might be wondering, how do you choose the right people to quote? How do you use the information they give you? Even if you’re not conducting live interviews the way journalists do, any research-based writing task requires you to learn how to weave in the information you find in books or other sources. So when do you quote and when do you paraphrase? How do you do both of those things seamlessly?

The pattern in Tip articles

• The first line of all Tip articles is a quote from an expert. (For example, “Hit the shark in the eyes and gills,” says Sarah Waries, the chief executive of Shark Spotters, an organization in Cape Town that employs 30 specialists to scan the city’s beaches with binoculars from the cliffs and sound the alarm when they see one in the water.”)

The pattern in a Tip article

• That same expert gives background and advice throughout the piece. (“It’s critical to stop the bleeding,” Waries says.)

The pattern in a Tip article

• The expert also usually gets the last word in the form of a final, fitting quote. (“Sharks are everywhere,” Waries says. “They’re in all the oceans.”)
• https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/04/learning/quoting-and-paraphrasing-expert...

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