As a university student or an academic, you will know all about the importance of paraphrasing. Rewriting services are available to address any of the paraphrasing tasks you may have, especially the urgent ones, but the art of paraphrasing is still a skill worth developing yourself.
If you can’t access a Proofreading service, or if you would prefer not to use rewriting services, this article will help you in two key ways. First of all, it will explain what paraphrasing (also known as rewriting) is, and it will show how it can help you include ideas from other authors in your writing without plagiarism. In turn, it will discuss some ways you can improve as a paraphraser.
What is paraphrasing?
Paraphrasing refers to the process of expressing information in your own words. University students are often required to paraphrase the work of other authors, which can often be very complex, in order to show that they understand, and also to avoid excessive use of quotation or plagiarism.
Many professionals online today for what they refer to as rewriting services. The purpose of this service is to paraphrase a piece of text for a client, whether for a student, a researcher, or a business person. As noted above, the services can be very convenient, but learning about how you can improve as a paraphraser is worthwhile.
How to improve as a paraphraser?
The first way to improve as a paraphraser is to have a system for doing it. One tried and tested paraphrasing procedure used is the following: read the text you are aiming to paraphrase; look away from the text and write down your impression of what it said; find any synonyms and change them in your new version; change the word order wherever it is similar; compare your new text against the original version to ensure you have not changed the meaning; and finally, reference the source you used.
Once you have a system in place, such as the one described above, there are a few other techniques you can use to become a strong paraphraser. One of the most straightforward is simply to use as many synonyms as you can for each of the words or phrases contained in the text you are paraphrasing. For example, if the text contains the phrase “twentieth century”, you could write “20th century” or “1900s”. Similarly, for words like “asserts”, you can swap these with synonyms (e.g., “maintains”, “argues”, or “claims”).
Changing the class of words in a document is another fairly simple and reliable way to successfully paraphrase it. As a case in point, if you see the word “assume” in a sentence that you are trying to paraphrase, rewrite the sentence such that this word is replaced by the same word of a different class (e.g., “assumption”, “assumed”, or “assuming”). This technique works best when you are having trouble thinking of a synonym for the word.
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