In a paraphrase, the writer restates in his or her own words all the relevant information from a passage, without any additional comments or any suggestion of agreement or disagreement with the source’s ideas. A paraphrase is useful for recording details of the passage when the order of the details is important but the source’s wording is not. Because all the details of the passage are included, a paraphrase is often about the same length as the original passage. It is better to paraphrase than to quote ordinary material in which the author’s way of expressing things is not worth special attention.
Here is a passage from a book on home schooling and an example of an acceptable paraphrase of it:
| Original Source | Acceptable Paraphrase |
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Bruner and the discovery theorists have also illuminated conditions that apparently pave the way for learning. It is significant that these conditions are unique to each learner, so unique, in fact, that in many cases classrooms can’t provide them. Bruner also contends that the more one discovers information in a great variety of circumstances, the more likely one is to develop the inner categories required to organize that information. Yet life at school, which is for the most part generic and predictable, daily keeps many children from the great variety of circumstances they need to learn well. —David Guterson, Family Matters: Why Homeschooling Makes Sense, p. 172 |
According to Guterson, the “discovery theorists,” particularly Bruner, have found that there seem to be certain conditions that help learning to take place. Because individuals require different conditions, many children are not able to learn in the classroom. According to Bruner, when people can explore information in many different situations, they learn to classify and order what they discover. The general routine of the school day, however, does not provide children with the diverse activities and situations that would allow them to learn these skills (172). |
The highlighting shows that some words in the paraphrase were taken from the source. Indeed, it would be nearly impossible for paraphrasers to avoid using any key terms from the source, and it would be counterproductive to try to do so, because the original and the paraphrase necessarily share the same information and concepts. Notice, though, that of the total of eighty-five words in the paraphrase, the paraphraser uses only a name (Bruner) and a few other key nouns and verbs for which it would be awkward to substitute other words or phrases. If the paraphraser had wanted to use other, more distinctive language from the source—for example, the description of life at school as “generic and predictable”—these adjectives would need to be enclosed in quotation marks. In fact, the paraphraser puts quotation marks around only one of the terms from the source: “discovery theorists”—a technical term likely to be unfamiliar to readers.
Paraphrasers must, however, avoid borrowing too many words and repeating the sentence structures from a source. Here is an unacceptable paraphrase of the first sentence in the Guterson passage:
Unacceptable Paraphrase: Too Many Borrowed Words and Phrases
Apparently, some conditions, which have been illuminated by Bruner and other discovery theorists, pave the way for people to learn.
Repeated sentence structure
Repeated words
Here, the paraphrase borrows almost all of its key language from the source sentence, including the entire phrase pave the way for. Even if you cite the source, this heavy borrowing would be considered plagiarism.
Here is another unacceptable paraphrase of the same sentence:
Unacceptable Paraphrase: Sentence Structure Repeated Too Closely
Bruner and other researchers have also identified circumstances that seem to ease the path to learning.
Repeated words
Synonyms
Repeated sentence structure
If you compare the source’s first sentence and this paraphrase of it, you will see that the paraphraser has borrowed the phrases and clauses of the source and arranged them in an almost identical sequence, simply substituting synonyms for most of the key terms. This paraphrase would also be considered plagiarism.