Writing with others' words: using background reading text in academic compositions

Successful academic writing involves, among other things, the ability to integrate information from previous researchers in relevant areas of study. Even the most original academic paper integrates facts, ideas, concepts, and theories from other sources by means of quotations, paraphrases, summaries, and brief references. Yet this common feature of academic writing has rarely been directly studied either in the writing of native or nonnative speakers of English. Even rarer is documentation of the highly complex processes followed by academic writers using background sources – processes that involve reading, understanding, learning, relating, planning, writing, revising, editing, and orchestrating.