Effective paraphrasing is an important skill for writing in college. You will frequently paraphrase information from your textbooks to answer homework and exam questions, and you will especially need this skill when you are writing essays that incorporate information from other writers. However, learning how to paraphrase can be challenging because often the topics and the vocabulary are new and unfamiliar to multilingual writers.
The purpose of paraphrasing is to restate an author’s ideas in your own words. Most writers find the following process for paraphrasing useful:
This is a very effective way to paraphrase; it requires that the writer have a large vocabulary and well-developed sentence-writing abilities. Sometimes it’s hard to find the right words to paraphrase a sentence or to know whether a paraphrase has the same meaning as the original source.
The following sections provide several rules of thumb that can help you develop skill with paraphrasing.