Paraphrasing

Read: Ch. 19 in The Penguin Handbook (pp. 322-335).

A second way to incorporate borrowed information and ideas into your own writing is to paraphrase. When summarizing Campbell's essay earlier, you used your own words to condense his argument to its main points. Paraphrases, however, do not condense. Instead, paraphrase involves putting the entire content of a short passage--all its ideas--into your own words, omitting nothing; thus paraphrases are generally the same length as the original passage.

Paraphrase has many uses. In summarizing an essay, for example, it's often necessary to paraphrase specific sentences or passages containing main ideas. In addition, if you paraphrase instead of quoting directly, you can often clarify complexly worded ideas, making them easier for a particular audience to understand. Finally, when students use a large number of direct quotes to support their arguments, they risk drowning out their own voice with the voices of others. Paraphrasing allows a student's own voice to be heard.

As explained and demonstrated in the readings assigned above, to avoid plagiarism when paraphrasing, you must not duplicate the words, order of information, or the sentence structure of the original passage. This means that although you will be using synonyms to replace the words used in the passage, you cannot simply plug the synonyms into the original sentence pattern. Instead, your goal is to "translate" the passage completely into your own words and sentences, freely and naturally.

When you incorporate paraphrases into your arguments, give credit to the original author by introducing the paraphrase with an attributive tag and following it with an MLA parenthetical in-text citation that supplies the page number of the passage you have paraphrased. (We will be discussing more on MLA citations later in this unit.)

Writing good paraphrases takes practice. First, make sure you truly understand what the writer has said. Next, think about other ways to put the same idea(s). Come up with words and phrases that break away from the original wording yet convey the same meaning. Finally, to keep from using the original structure and sentence patterns, look away from the passage when you write your paraphrase. Continue to revise your paraphrase until you are satisfied that you have accurately and naturally put the original passage into your own words and patterns.