Is it unambiguous what "it" refers to?

Are you aware that a paraphrase is not a quotation, Andrew? Whenever you quote someone, you are not paraphrasing. Every time you use the term "paraphrase" on this forum, you misuse it. To paraphrase is to rephrase someone's words in your own words; it is not to duplicate that person's words. Duplication of someone's exact words, in part or in full, is either quotation or plagiarism, depending on whether quotation marks are used.

Just noticed that this post has an irrelevant title; sorry about that. The title should've been something else.

On the issue of what "paraphrasing" is, you could have a block quote and that would obviously be 100% their words. But what if did something like this:

Bob said: of all the major economic crisis of the last decade, "three were due to bad policy"; there were various important metrics in Joe's report that "didn't make sense to use"; and there was a very good reason to "not go back to the old policies".

In this notice that there's a "said" before the colon that applies to the black text but that the black text isn't Bob's words. How would you describe this kind of situation, then?

@Andrew Van Wagner posted:

On the issue of what "paraphrasing" is, you could have a block quote and that would obviously be 100% their words. But what if did something like this:

Bob said: of all the major economic crisis of the last decade, "three were due to bad policy"; there were various important metrics in Joe's report that "didn't make sense to use"; and there was a very good reason to "not go back to the old policies".

In this notice that there's a "said" before the colon that applies to the black text but that the black text isn't Bob's words. How would you describe this kind of situation, then?

If the words which follow "said" and which are not enclosed in quotation marks rephrase—in your own words—aspects of what he said, without changing the meaning or adding or subtracting from it, then what you have done is to use a combination of quotation and paraphrase.

That is quite different from what you did in your opening post. In that post, you did not paraphrase at all. All you did was take some quotations and omit some words from them. What I want to make sure you understand is that merely deleting words from quotations does not make the quotations paraphrases!