Reporting Verbs
Explore different ways of referring to literature and foregrounding your voice.
Reporting verbs help you introduce the ideas or words of others as paraphrase or quotation from scholarly literature. Always accompanied by a reference, they indicate where you’re drawing on other people’s work to build your own argument. They also indicate your stance (agree, disagree, etc) on the scholarship you’re describing, highlighting your critical contribution. There are lots of reporting verbs to choose from and, depending on the context, they might be used to convey more than one stance, so you’ll notice that some appear in more than one category.
The following reporting verbs has been organised according to the critical stances they signal.
Reporting verbs
- Observes
- Describes
- Discusses
- Reports
- Outlines
- Remarks
- States
- Goes on to say that
- Quotes that
- Says
- Mentions
- Articulates
- Writes
- Relates
- Conveys
Examples
Abrams mentions that culture shock has “long been misunderstood as a primarily psychological phenomenon” (34)
Chakrabarty outlines the four stages of mitosis (72-3)
Reporting verbs
- Recognises
- Clarifies
- Acknowledges
- Concedes
- Accepts
- Refutes
- Uncovers
- Admits
- Demonstrates
- Highlights
- Illuminates
- Supports
- Concludes
- Elucidates
- Reveals
- Verifies
Examples
Abrams refutes the idea that culture shock is a “primarily psychological phenomenon” (34)
Chakrabarty demonstrates that mitosis actually occurs over five stages (73)
Reporting verbs
- Argues
- Reasons
- Maintains
- Contends
- Hypothesises
- Proposes
- Theorises
- Feels
- Considers
- Asserts
- Disputes
- Advocates
- Opines
- Thinks
- Implies
- Posits
Examples
Abrams contends that culture shock is socially produced (38)
Chakrabarty hypothesises that metaphase is a more complex process than previously thought (77)
Reporting verbs
- Believes
- Claims
- Justifies
- Insists
- Assumes
- Alleges
- Denies
- Speculates
- Disregards
- Supposes
- Conjectures
- Surmises
Examples
Abrams’ analysis disregards the neurochemical factors that contribute to culture shock (36)
Chakrabarty speculates that “metaphase is the most important stage of mitosis” (78)