Paraphrasing sources effectively

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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. Learning how to paraphrase can be challenging, especially if English is not your first language, because often the topics and the vocabulary are new and unfamiliar.

The purpose of paraphrasing is to restate an author’s ideas in your own words. Most writers find the following process for paraphrasing useful:

  1. Read and understand the text.
  2. Put the text aside.
  3. Express the information in your own words.
  4. Compare your paraphrase to the original text to check that you have used different words and different sentence structures but have kept the author’s meaning.

This is a very effective way to paraphrase, but 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.

Understanding synonyms

Determining the source’s meaning

Presenting the source’s meaning in your own words