Choose five of the things below and define them without saying their names or blanking them out, making sure you concentrate on their meanings in academic writing, particularly for quoting and commenting on sources. Can your partner guess which you are describing? Do they agree with your definitions?
- a (small) minority
- a (traditional) saying
- a bibliography
- a claim/ to claim
- a collection of papers
- a consensus/ the consensus
- a direct translation/ a literal translation
- a figure
- a graph
- a list of references
- a majority/ the (vast) majority
- a misinterpretation/ to misinterpret
- a misquotation/ to misquote
- a periodical
- a proverb
- a rough translation
- a statistic
- a summary/ to summarise
- a synonym
- a table
- a tautology
- a view
- a/ an (important/ classic/ valuable/ valuable/ invaluable/ primary/ secondary) source
- a/ an (recognised) authority
- a/ some distortion (of what someone said)
- a/ some reinterpretation/ to reinterpret
- a/ someone’s body of work
- above
- academic literature
- aforementioned
- an (acknowledged) expert
- an academic journal
- an academic paper
- an academic source
- an antonym
- an essay
- an extract
- an indent
- apparently
- appear to
- attribution/ attributed to
- below
- circa
- controversial/ controversy
- discredited
- documentary evidence
- double quotation marks
- erroneously
- et al.
- following/ follow
- groundbreaking
- hypothesis
- i.e.
- ibid.
- inconclusive
- inconsistent with
- infamous
- influential
- insightful
- op cit.
- paradigm-changing
- parenthesis/ parentheses
- private communication
- provisional
- relevant/ relevance
- retrieved
- round brackets
- seminal
- sic
- significance/ significant
- single quotation marks
- square brackets
- the former
- the latter
- to acknowledge
- to advocate
- to argue
- to assert
- to assume
- to challenge
- to clarify
- to conclude
- to confirm
- to contend
- to contradict
- to counter something
- to demonstrate
- to deny/ a denial
- to describe/ a description
- to determine
- to dismiss
- to draw attention to
- to draw on
- to emphasize
- to establish
- to examine
- to explain
- to find
- to hypothesize
- to identify
- to illustrate
- to imply
- to indicate
- to insist
- to interpret/ interpretation
- to maintain
- to mention (in passing)
- to note
- to observe
- to owe a (considerable/ substantial) debt to
- to paraphrase
- to point out
- to posit
- to postulate
- to propose
- to prove
- to question
- to recognize
- to refute
- to retract
- to reveal
- to review
- to show
- to speculate
- to state
- to stress
- to suggest
- to tally with
- to theorize
- to verify
- unpublished
- widely quoted
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PDF version for easy printing: Define the quoting sources vocabulary
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