I'm currently writing my PhD thesis. This research is the continuation of my master thesis which I did in a different institution. In order to introduce the work of my master thesis in my PhD document, I have copied three pages of text directly from an article I wrote (together with three other colleagues) about my master thesis work, as well as some figures.
Is this OK or should I rewrite this somehow?
If it is OK, how should I reference it to the article? Should I reference it at the end of the paragraph or can I just add a sentence in the beginning saying something like "the content of this point has been extracted from"?
If it is not OK, should I rewrite this text with different words? I would like to avoid doing this, because it was already hard for me to write that text once and finding other words may look like a poor copy.
Thanks in advance for the advise.