Paraphrasing

An advantage of paraphrasing is that it indicates that you have understood the text or source and your writing flows more smoothly.

With a good skill of paraphrasing, you can successfully manage a variety of tasks you need to complete in English, particularly in your university courses and also in your professional career.

To paraphrase basically means to rewrite a sentence or a phrase in your own words.

You stick to the same meaning or message, but you state it differently, using different words and/or grammatical structures.

When you are paraphrasing a sentence in a text, you use the key words of the author, but other than that, you use many words of your own in possibly a different sentence structure.

When paraphrasing, due attention should be paid not to use wording or expressions that are too similar or almost the same as the original. In that case, you may be committing plagiarism, especially if you do not cite the source.

Read the text several times

Highlight or note down the key concepts

Write your own version

Compare the original and your own version

Cite the source you have used

When you want to use a sentence or a phrase in your own work by paraphrasing, it is best that you read that section several times and make sure you fully understand the message. If you can not comprehend the message, it will be difficult for you to state it in your own words. Otherwise, you will write down your misinterpretation of the original message.

Try to brainstorm about how you can state the main message differently. You can think about what kind of changes you can make in the structure of the sentences, but be careful that even though you will say it in different words and in a different sentence structure, you should still be saying the same thing.

Using others’ ideas without any change and most importantly, not giving them credit can be called ‘cheating’, or in academic contexts, ‘plagiarism’.

Therefore, when we benefit from other sources to compile our own work, we cannot simply copy and paste; we need to put some thought on what we find, state it in our own words and cite it.

Citing means making reference to the original author of a work when you use them in your own assignment or paper.

APA (American Psychological Association) style is quite common in fields like psychology or education. However, there are other styles as well, including MLA style (i.e. common in literature or languages), NB in Chicago style (i.e. common in humanities) and IEEE styles.

If you plan to submit your work to a journal or a publishing body, you need to examine their writing conventions to see what citation style they use.

There are some techniques you can employ:

Make use of synonyms to replace words

Use di­fferent forms of a word

Change sentence from active to passive voice

Change the order of words or phrases

Use more than one technique to paraphrase

One of the most common and maybe the most important technique used in paraphrasing is making use of synonyms.

A synonym is a word or phrase with the same or nearly the same meaning as another word or phrase.

Another common way of paraphrasing is by changing the form of the word(s).

One way to do this is to change the sentence from active to passive voice, or vice-versa.

Copying and pasting from an external source without any changes or with a change of only a few words is not paraphrasing.