What is it?
You can bring a source into a paper with either a paraphrase or a direct quote. A paraphrase uses different words to represent the same ideas as the original text. A direct quote should never stand alone as its own sentence. Instead, all quotes should be integrated. Integration means combining some of your own words with one or more quotes into a single sentence.
Signal phrases like "according to [author]" and "[author] argues" offer one easy way to integrate quotes, but they are not the only way. You can add your own words before a quote, after a quote, in the middle of a quote or any combination of the three. Colons can be useful for integration as well: make a general claim in a complete sentence before the colon, then use a quote to clarify or provide evidence afterward.
No sentence should be entirely a quote, but some might mostly consist of a quote with just a few of your own words. Others might be mostly your own writing with just a few words directly quoted, combining a quote with a paraphrase. The best writers vary how they integrate quotes, just like they vary sentence length and structure, so try experimenting with different methods next time you write.
Strategies
Let's say we want to use the following sentence from Henrietta Harrison’s The Man Awakened from Dreams: "From 1900 on, the state gradually abandoned its Confucian values in favor of a new emphasis on nationalism and a vision of modernity tied to international trade and large-scale urban industry.”
Below are a few different ways to incorporate this idea into a paper.
Paraphrase
In the early 20th century, the Chinese government turned away from Confucianism and toward nationalism, global commerce and industrialization.
Signal phrase integration
Harrison argues that "from 1900 on, the state gradually abandoned its Confucian values in favor of a new emphasis on nationalism and a vision of modernity tied to international trade and large-scale urban industry.”
Other common signal phrase verbs: asserts, concludes, demonstrates, explains, notes, observes, suggests.
Colon integration
Harrison identifies a major ideological shift in early 20th-century China: “the state gradually abandoned its Confucian values in favor of a new emphasis on nationalism and a vision of modernity tied to international trade and large-scale urban industry.”
Integration and paraphrase combo
After 1900, the Chinese government embraced ”a vision of modernity tied to international trade and large-scale urban industry” at the expense of Confucianism.