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Understanding synonyms

Learning to paraphrase will help you communicate the ideas of authors effectively and avoid plagiarism, the act of using another person’s ideas or words without giving credit to that person. However, even if you tell your reader that information comes from another author, you can still commit plagiarism if you change only the words but do not make the presentation of the information your own.

Some writers misinterpret the instructions to “use your own words”; they simply replace words in the source with synonyms, words that have similar meanings. Such word-by-word paraphrases frequently result in awkward sentence structures and inaccuracy.

Meaning in English often comes from phrases and sentences rather than from individual words. Also, synonyms have similar meanings, but they rarely have identical meanings. Sometimes a synonym requires a different sentence structure than the original word does.

The following examples illustrate some of the problems that can arise with word-by-word paraphrasing.

Here is a short passage from Rebecca Webber’s article “Make Your Own Luck.” The following discussion describes two unacceptable paraphrases of this passage.

ORIGINAL SOURCE

People who spot and seize opportunity are different. They are more open to life’s forking paths, so they see possibilities others miss. And if things don’t work out the way they’d hoped, they brush off disappointment and launch themselves headlong toward the next fortunate circumstance. As a result, they’re happier and more likely to achieve their goals.

—Rebecca Webber, “Make Your Own Luck,” p. 64

Following is a word-by-word paraphrase of the sentences in green.

UNACCEPTABLE PARAPHRASE: MEANING CHANGED

Persons who see and grab chances are diverse. They are further exposed to life’s dividing trails, and they view prospects others ignore.

The first problem with this paraphrase is that the student who wrote it used the same sentence structure as in the original passage. Because she did not use her own sentence structure, this paraphrase is plagiarized. Second, the words that the student substituted are not exact synonyms, so the paraphrase has lost some of the meaning of the original passage.

The word grab is an informal synonym of the word seize and may not be acceptable in a formal paper.
Diverse and different have similar, but not identical, meanings. The word different in the original sentence implies that people who are open to opportunities are different from people who are not open to opportunities. Using diverse in the paraphrase implies that people who welcome opportunity are different from one another. Using diverse distorts the meaning of the sentence.
Using exposed instead of open changes the meaning in a significant way. Exposed implies that something negative has happened to these people, while open is a positive character trait.

As you paraphrase, it might help to keep this in mind: simply substituting synonyms into the original passage does not guarantee an accurate paraphrase.

The paraphrase of the sentence highlighted in brown in the original source demonstrates another potential problem with word-by-word paraphrases. Using synonyms often requires changing the surrounding sentence structure because in English the same word can be more than one part of speech. For example, work can be either a noun or a verb; in the following paraphrase, the student has substituted the noun effort for the verb work, but it is not an appropriate substitution.

ORIGINAL SOURCE

—Rebecca Webber, “Make Your Own Luck,” p. 64

UNACCEPTABLE PARAPHRASE: AWKWARD RESULT

And if everything don’t effort out the manner they’d wanted, they rebuff disappointment and throw themselves impulsive toward the next lucky situation.

When the student changed things to everything, she also needed to change the verb from the plural form (don’t) to the singular form (doesn’t).
Using effort in place of work is inappropriate. Effort is a synonym for the noun work but not a synonym for the verb work. The part of speech of a word is an important consideration when choosing a synonym.
When
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the student substituted manner for way, she should have used a different structure: in the manner.
Although headlong has a similar meaning to impulsive, in this sentence headlong is an adverb modifying the verb launch, and impulsive is an adjective. An adjective cannot replace an adverb in a sentence.