When teaching citation skills, both direct and indirect quotations are often introduced. It is direct quotations that are frequently used in student papers, and we often find problems with their usages of direct quotations. Unlike direct quotations, indirect quotations allow a writer to paraphrase the original text and easily manipulate it according to a writer's own paper context for smoother thesis development. Therefore, an instructor must not only be aware of the problems of direct quotations, but also give students proper guidance, considering the advantages of indirect quotations which are not to be mere shortened forms of the original text.
