Using a source text without over-quoting
In a practice written examination, a candidate, Kirill, writes a response to a stimulus text about volunteering among young people. The stimulus is 250 words and contains several striking phrases. Kirill's response is 400 words, of which about 180 are direct quotations from the stimulus, stitched together with 'как сказано в тексте' and 'автор пишет, что'. His teacher's feedback says the response 'reports rather than responds' and that the task required him to engage with the ideas, not reproduce them. Kirill protests that quoting shows he understood the text, and that paraphrasing risks changing the author's meaning. The task asked candidates to discuss the extent to which the text's claims are convincing, using their own knowledge and experience.
1. Explain the difference between reporting a source and engaging with it, using Kirill's response as the example.
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Reporting reproduces content; engaging evaluates it. Kirill's response signals understanding by lifting phrases and attributing them, but it never takes a position on whether the claims hold. The task asked him to judge how convincing the text is, which requires him to accept, qualify or challenge specific claims and to supply reasons - his own knowledge, examples or experience.
His heavy quotation (nearly half the response) also crowds out his own voice: the assessor sees the stimulus author's reasoning, not the candidate's. A useful test is whether the response would survive if the quotations were removed - if the argument collapses, it was reporting.
Quotation is legitimate when it is brief, chosen for a specific analytical purpose (a loaded phrase worth examining), and immediately followed by comment. Kirill's quotations are decorative and sequential.
2. Give Kirill a practical method for reducing quotation while preserving accuracy.
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First, cap quotation: aim for no more than two or three short quoted phrases in a response, each followed by a sentence of comment. Everything else should be paraphrase or reference ('the author's claim that…').
Second, use a three-step move for each source claim: state it in his own words, then evaluate it ('this is convincing up to a point, because…'), then support the evaluation with evidence from his own knowledge or experience.
Third, address his fear of distortion: paraphrase at the level of the claim, not the wording, and check it against the original - if he can restate the claim and the author would agree, accuracy is preserved without copying.
Finally, he should practise rewriting one over-quoted paragraph, converting each quotation into a claim-plus-comment, and compare word counts. The target is a response where his own argument is the spine and the source is cited, not reproduced.