Why Is Paraphrasing Important?

This skill is important to develop early in your academic career because your paraphrased notes are what will become the words and paragraphs in your essay. Making good use of paraphrasing improves your critical thinking skills and demonstrates your credibility as a researcher. Being able to rewrite someone else’s ideas in your own words shows off your understanding of the material, and allows you to improve your academic writing!

Remember: there are times that direct quotes can be used, but your assignments should not be reliant on quotes. Overreliance on direct quotation can cost you marks, and runs the risk of becoming plagiarism. You have to demonstrate an understanding of the subject to gain marks!

Paraphrasing Video Lesson

What Is Paraphrasing?

Paraphrasing is the re-writing, re-wording or re-stating in your own words of someone else’s argument, theory or observations. A paraphrase must remain true to the core concept/idea/argument given in the original. Paraphrased material must still give reference to the original source! Paraphrased material can include information gathered from books, academic journals and other reputable academic sources.

The bulk of information referenced in an academic paper should be paraphrased - not directly quoted! Direct quotations can be useful if the author’s specific wording is relevant to your argument - but otherwise paraphrasing is almost always better.

How to Paraphrase

Step 1: Understanding

Read the material until you understand it. That might mean you have to re-read the material a couple of times, but once you understand it properly, you will have no problem paraphrasing what the author is saying!

When reading, practise active reading by keeping an eye out for key words, concepts, frameworks and theories. Keep an eye out especially for any terms that are used repeatedly, or which seem central to the author’s argument. If you are unclear of anything, ask someone!

Step 2: Key Words

Once you’ve read the text and have a good understanding of it, pull out the key words by underlining or noting them. If you are unsure of some of the meaning of the words, you need to look it up.

Pulling out the key words and content will help you to do the following:

Remember the content.
Focus on eliminating overly descriptive content.

Step 3: Summarising

Summarising is a useful tool when paraphrasing, as it allows you to succinctly express another author’s ideas in your own words.

Write a summary using the key words you pulled out from the text. Summarise by removing excess information while keeping the core idea in tact - a summary will always be shorter than the original text. Always keep the purpose of your research in mind when paraphrasing - ask yourself: "Is the material relevant to the assignment you have been given?"

When summarising, synonyms can be useful to help you express an idea in your own words; you can find synonyms for words by using a thesaurus. For example, there is a built-in thesaurus in MS Word - located by clicking the "Review" Tab on the left-hand side in in Word. There is also a thesaurus in Google Docs which can be located within the "define" tool, or simply by highlighting the word and right-clicking it, which will allow you to select the “define” option. Remember, not all synonyms are appropriate!

Step 4: Comparison

Compare your text to the original text and ask yourself: “Does this reflect the original material?” If it does - you have successfully paraphrased!

Remember, this is NOT your idea, even though it is your own words. So, if you are using this information in an essay it MUST be referenced.

Assess Your Paraphrased Material

☑ The meaning is the same

☑ Most of the words have been changed

☑ The sentences have been significantly restructured

☑ The material relates to the question and/or assignment

☑ This information is correctly referenced

Paraphrasing Example

Let’s paraphrase the following example:

“Students frequently overuse direct quotation in taking notes, and as a result they overuse quotations in the final [research] paper. Probably only about 10% of your final manuscript should appear as directly quoted matter. Therefore, you should strive to limit the amount of exact transcribing of source materials while taking notes”. (Lester, James D., Writing Research Papers. 2nd ed. (1976): 46-47.)

First, we read the passage until we’ve understood it - then we pull out the key words and ideas:

‘Students frequently overuse direct quotation in taking notes…’
‘...as a result [students] overuse quotations in the final [research] paper.’
‘...only about 10% of your final manuscript should appear as directly quoted matter.’
‘...limit the amount of exact transcribing of source materials…’

We can now use these to build a summary, rewriting the passage in our words. There are many ways we can do this, but one example might be:

‘Students often overuse direct quotation when they are taking notes. The amount of direct quotation should be kept to a minimum when researching, as the majority of a student’s writing should be paraphrased rather than directly quoted. (Lester, James D., Writing Research Papers. 2nd ed. (1976): 46-47.)’

We can now check this against the original passage to make sure we’ve kept the same idea as the original text, even while changing it into our own words!

Things to Remember

Here are some things to remember when paraphrasing, and some common mistakes to avoid:

All directly-quoted text must be placed within quotation marks.
Assignments should never be overly-reliant on direct quotation: Do not depend on big blocks of directly-quoted text to make your argument for you!
Whether quoting directly or paraphrasing, always reference according to required referencing guidelines.
The amount of quotation allowed varies from subject to subject, but paraphrasing should always be the main way you reference sources!

Remember: it is plagiarism to use the words, ideas or arguments of others without referencing the original source, even ifyou are paraphrasing those ideas. When researching, keep a careful note of where your paraphrased material is coming from.

Paraphrasing your academic sources