Paraphrasing

Why should you Paraphrase?

There are several reasons of paraphrasing your content. Firstly, it makes you able to understand what an author is saying in his book/text so that you can rewrite it in your own words to avoid the repetition of words and sentences, but keeping the meaning as it is. Secondly, it lets you avoid plagiarism; if you accurately paraphrase another author’s idea, it keeps you away from stealing other authors’ copyrights. In a sentence, effective paraphrasing is important in the academic writing to avoid plagiarism.

What is Importance of Paraphrasing?

It is important that you paraphrase an author’s idea by expressing it in your words and failing to do so would make you end up with a stack of quotations and raw information cluttered together. Paraphrasing is vital as it provides support to your writing that make your claim stronger. In addition, it expands the depth of your subject and provides several point of views on the subject. In short, it is essential in essay writing or note taking.

Paraphrasing versus Summarizing

Paraphrasing is presenting the same idea or meaning of the original text with different words. It could be longer or shorter than the original one; it helps students incorporating evidences and other source materials into their work. While summarizing on the other hand is an overview of a text in which the main idea is portrayed whilst the details and examples are left out. Summarizing reduces the text that make it short by only including the important points and ideas. Summarising and paraphrasing both are essential writing skills that leads a student towards his success at a university. Both these writing skills let you incorporate the work and ideas of other writers in your assignments and tasks. With the skills of paraphrasing and summarising, you are able to illustrate the understandings and meanings you have read in books and texts. This powerful skill steers you to write numerous tasks and papers that are required from you.

What is use of Citations in Paraphrasing?

Citations are important in paraphrasing because the original text needs to be cited letting the readers know that the idea doesn’t belong to the writer even though it’s not exactly the same words. The proper use of citations is essential in paraphrasing as a writer cannot comment or interpret his own meanings. Therefore, everything written should be properly cited so that the readers know the exact source of information.

What are Points to consider for Paraphrasing?

A good paraphrase would have different words altogether from the original script while keeping the same meaning of the original text. However, there are multiple techniques for paraphrasing. Changing the vocabulary of the content is one of the techniques. For example, studies could be changed with research or mud could be changed with deposits or society could be changed with civilisation. Nevertheless, words such as economics, socialism or global warming cannot be replaced with other words. Another way for paraphrasing is by changing the word class from a noun to an adjective or an adjective to a noun such as changing the noun “Egypt” to an adjective “Egyptian” or changing an adjective and noun to a noun like “mountainous regions” to “in the mountains”. Changing the word order can also be used such as converting this sentence “Ancient Egypt collapsed” to “the collapse of the Egyptian society”. These points must be kept in mind while paraphrasing. A whole sentence or a paragraph could be then paraphrased by the help of new vocabulary, by changing the word class and by changing the sentence or word order while simultaneously retaining its meaning. As a result, the combination of these techniques would thus derive the actual way of paraphrasing.

Good and Bad Paraphrasing Example

The following examples will look into how bad and good paraphrasing are done. This is an unsuccessful paraphrase: Original Text “Understanding the processes of employee involvement, the perceptions of empowerment, the perception of employee satisfaction, employee productivity, and the intent of an employee to remain at the company has gained the attention of a great number of research and employers”. Bad Paraphrasing Understanding the processes of employee involvement, the perceptions of authorization, the perception of how the employee can be satisfied, employee productivity, and the aim of an employee to continue working at the company has gained the attention of great number of research and employers. The aforementioned paraphrasing is bad as it is written word to word and has the cut and paste plagiarism from the original text. The writer in this paraphrase maintained the author’s method of expression and sentence structure. He has not included any quotation marks – it does not refers to the original text. Therefore, it is considered as bad paraphrasing and known as plagiarism. The good paraphrasing example is given below in which the original idea with proper citations and references are provided. Original Text “The linguistic criticism of Nineteen Eighty-Four focuses mostly on Newspeak as a language and on Orwell’s ideas about language and thought. The few critical remarks about Orwell’s use of language have been bad, claiming that his poor writing style was due to Orwell’s career as a journalist or the topic of his novel. Only the critic Irving Howe felt that Orwell’s style appreciated by someone like Defoe. Kies believes all those critics are wrong.” (Kies, pg.1, 2011) Good Paraphrasing Kies argues that the critic’s reactions to the Orwell’s writing style in 1984 is wrong. Most critics charge that the novel’s style is dry and lifeless, attributing this either to teh Orwell’s career as a journalist or to the novel’s dreary topic. Even one critic’s modest defense of the Orwell’s style strikes Kies as weak. (Kies, pg.1, 2011)