Paraphrasing: Strategies and Importance for Academic Writing

Skills

Paraphrasing
It simply means to formulate the idea of someone else in the own words. In order to
paraphrase a content, the writer has to rewrite the whole passage without even changing meaning
of original text. It is an alternative to the quoting wherein the writer copy’s the exact words of
other and then put them in the quotation marks. It is an essential aspect when writing about the
academic content as it shows that the writer has understood the source in a well enough manner
so that it can be written in the own words. It works as the powerful tool to use the direct quotes
which may be used in an infrequent manner (Hagaman and Casey, 2017).
There are various strategies may be useful in order to develop the paraphrasing skills and the
most essential feature of it is mainly to make sure that the text is understood by writer before an
attempt is made for paraphrasing it. These strategies include the following-
 Reading the text in a careful manner before an attempt is taken to paraphrase it.
 Referring the dictionary when any word is not being properly understood.
 Re reading the content in a quick manner and when the writer is confident about its
writing, it can skim the content and pay attention only to the first sentence in the
paragraphs and the key words.
 Writing down the verbal summary of the text which is paraphrased.
 Checking original content in repeated manner so that it can be ensured that the main
points are included and include the quote marks in it if the phrases or the unique terms
are used in original text which cannot be paraphrased.
 Using the own words to paraphrase and it is not essential to use the complex language of
academic, rather simple language may help ion paraphrasing the content (Tan, 2017).
There are different types of paraphrasing which includes the following-
 Changing the parts of the speech: This type of paraphrasing involves replacing the parts
of the speech which ranges from nouns and verbs to adverbs and adjectives with the new
parts of the speech.
 Changing the structure: This kind of paraphrasing includes the change in the structure of
the sentence, sometimes creation of the passive voice from active voice and vice versa.
This change in the structure may be utilized in order to reflect the interpretation of the
writer of original content.