15 What is Paraphrasing?

The ability to paraphrase is a critical thinking skill that will serve you well as a college reader and writer. Paraphrasing means reading a sentence or two from an article and then restating the author’s words in your own words without changing the original meaning or point the author made. As a reader, paraphrasing can be used as an annotation tool to help clarify the author’s words for yourself. Putting the author’s ideas in your own words demonstrates and solidifies your understanding of their concepts.

You can also use paraphrasing as a writer.  Sometimes you may want to incorporate the ideas of others into your writing by paraphrasing someone else’s words. In this way, you strengthen your ideas with support from other writers. Remember, paraphrasing is different from quoting because quoting is a word-for-word statement from another writer enclosed by quotation marks, while paraphrasing is restating the ideas and concepts of another writer in your own words. It is important to note that even if you are writing another author’s concepts and ideas in your own words, you must still give credit to the writer you are paraphrasing.

Additionally, paraphrasing isn’t the act of simply switching out certain words in a sentence with their synonyms.  Instead, not only should you replace the words, you must change the structure of the sentence.  One way to do this is to ask yourself, what did the writer mean when they wrote this sentence?  Then, write your answer to the question in a way that you would explain it to someone else who hasn’t read the author’s work in its entirety.