Paraphrasing – What Does It Mean?

Dear Student,

As a student, you are not expected to know everything. The good news is that you can rely on the work of other scholars by citing their ideas to support yours. This can be done in two ways: direct quotations or paraphrasing.

Using direct quotes is relatively easy because you simply copy-paste whatever content you want to use and provide an in-text citation, including a page number.

For many students, the challenge comes when they have to paraphrase. So, we decided to address the issue in today’s email.

When paraphrasing, you convey the same meaning as the original text in different words or sentence structure.

How to Paraphrase

The University College of London has created an easy step-by-step guide on how you should go about paraphrasing:

  • Look at the content you want to paraphrase and ask an important question: What is the key information here?
  • Change the order of ideas or words to reflect how you understand the information.
  • Change the grammatical or word form if possible.
  • Use synonyms for some words, but remember to keep the key terms related to the subject you are writing about.
  • When a specific order of words (three or more consecutive words) cannot be changed, present the content in quotation marks showing that it’s a direct quote.
  • Make it clear throughout the writing that the ideas you are presenting are not yours by repeating the author’s name or pronoun several times.
  • Always cite the author using the appropriate referencing technique stipulated by your university.

It’s vital to remember that just because you have a correct in-text citation doesn’t mean you haven’t plagiarised. If your paraphrasing is just a substitution of synonyms here and there but mostly maintains the original words of the author you’re attempting to paraphrase, you’ve plagiarised.

Find Help
Paraphrasing can be a considerable challenge for many students, particularly those who don’t speak English as a first language. This is why we at Virtual English Teacher will proofread, paraphrase, or edit your essay to ensure that similarity is within the acceptable range of many universities.

Want proof of our effectiveness and efficiency. Ask for a free, no-obligation sample of your text.
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