Are you trying to learn more about paraphrasing and how you can do it properly? You’ve come to the right place.
Students have to be extra careful when it comes to paraphrasing content. They can get into trouble if a citation is missing or if the changes made are too few and sparse.
In this guide, we’ll provide you with the necessary information that you need to properly understand paraphrasing as well as its status in academia.
What is Paraphrasing?
Let’s start off with the basics. What is paraphrasing?
In the roughest of definitions, paraphrasing can be defined as the act of changing a piece of text in order to make it look different while conveying the same meaning.
If there is any change to the context, meaning, and intent of the content in question, then the alterations will not be counted as ‘paraphrasing.’
Here is an example to demonstrate this better:
Original Text: The man sneezed and wiped his nose.
Paraphrased Text: The man gave a sneeze and cleaned his nose.
Not Paraphrased Text: The person sneezed because of the pollen in the air and then swiped his nose.
Since the third sentence did not stick directly to the actual content (due to the added detail), it’s not technically paraphrasing.
Status of Paraphrasing in Academia
Now, let’s get to the bigger question: what is the status of paraphrasing in academia?
Judging from the nature of the act, i.e., the alteration of existing content authored by someone else, it may be somewhat obvious that paraphrasing is not allowed in academic content. However, that is not the case.
There are some cases and situations in which paraphrasing is completely fine to do. Similarly, there are other situations in which it is neither allowed nor ethical.
| When Paraphrasing is Allowed | When Paraphrasing is Not Allowed |
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How is Paraphrasing Done?
With this, let’s move on to the next part of this post, i.e., the guide to paraphrasing.
a. Method Number 1 (The Manual Method)
When it comes to manual paraphrasing, there are three main phases in which we can divide the whole process. They are as follows:
- The reading and understanding phase
- The changing and editing phase
- The proofreading phase
The Reading and Understanding Phase
In the introduction, we gave an example of three sentences, one of which was labeled ‘not paraphrased text’ due to the fact that it featured an extraneous detail.
Considering that, we know how important it is to properly understand the content at hand before paraphrasing it. If you don’t understand the context and make any changes that don’t reflect the overall meaning and intent of the original text, the paraphrasing will not be proper.
Here is what you can do in this phase:
- Read the content slowly
- Read it once again
- Look up the meanings of any difficult words that may be present in the article
- If you still have trouble understanding the meaning of the content, try translating it into your native language. But this only applies if the content you’re reading is not written in your native language.
The Changing and Editing Phase
Once you are done with reading and understanding the content, you can move on to the actual changing and editing part.
This is more or less the main and most important part of the whole paraphrasing process. Considering that, we will dilate on this section a little more than the rest.
Now, there are a number of different types of changes that you can make to the content in order to paraphrase it. Depending on the need and on the text in question, you can apply either some or all of those changes.
1. Synonymizing
The simplest and basic change that can constitute ‘paraphrasing’ is simple synonymizing. ‘Synonymizing,’ in this context, means changing some of the words in the text with suitable alternatives. We say ‘suitable’ because not all synonyms of a particular word can be contextually correct for every situation.
Here, let’s look at an example.
Original Text: The man picked up the 2-foot stick from the ground and broke it across his knee.
Properly Synonymized Version: The person picked up the 2-foot piece of wood from the floor and snapped it across his knee.
In the example above, you can see that the synonyms used in place of the original words are all in line with the actual context. But if we were to use just any random synonyms, the results would be something like this:
Improperly Synonymized Version: The ou picked up the 2-foot pole from the terra firma and bankrupted it across his knee.
Technically, all the words that have been used to replace the original ones here are ‘synonyms.’ But since they don’t match the context, they are not correct here.
As far as finding the synonyms goes, there are plenty of resources that you can use. For one, you can simply do a search on Google with the query “…synonyms for *blank*…” and you’ll get some good results.
If you use Microsoft Word for your write-ups, you can get synonyms even more quickly. All you have to do is select a word and then right-click on it. After that, you can select the ‘synonyms’ option…kind of like this:
- Shuffling the Clauses
This is also a good way to change the look of the content being paraphrased in order to make it look unique and different. Shuffling the clauses (parts) of a sentence alone isn’t usually enough, which is why the synonymizing technique has to be used along with it.
Let’s take the same example given above and shuffle the clauses to demonstrate this point:
Clauses Shuffled: The person broke the 2-foot stick across his knee after picking it up from the ground.
In the above sentence, the first event, i.e., picking up, was taken to the end of the sentence, whereas the second event, i.e., breaking, was taken to the start.
If we also include the synonymizing technique here, this is the result that we would get:
Clauses Shuffled and Synonymized: The man snapped the 2-foot pole across his knee after retrieving it from the floor.
- Making Changes to the Phrases
Changes to the phrases should be made sparsely so that the actual context and meaning are not disturbed.
When we say ‘making changes to the phrases,’ we mean doing things like shortening a group of words to just one or expanding a single word to a whole group.
For example, we could change the words ‘…he was walking crookedly, raising one foot higher than the other…’ to ‘…he was walking with a limp…’.
Similarly, we could also go the other way around and change a short word, such as ‘belligerency,’ to ‘an attitude of war-like aggression.’
Let’s look at a proper example of this.
Original Sentence: The man picked up the 2-foot stick and broke it across his knee.
Phrase Changes: The man picked up the 2-foot stick and broke it by bringing it down on his knee.
Yet again, when making this sort of change, you have to be careful that you don’t change the context of the original text.
The Proofreading Phase
After you’re done with making the edits to the content, you have to move on to the proofreading phase.
Contrary to what the word ‘proofreading’ usually means, you don’t really have to check the paraphrased version for grammar and spelling errors. I mean, sure, you automatically will be doing that.
But, your focus during this phase should be on finding any sort of changes or alterations that may be disturbing the original meaning or context. If you find any such changes, you can alter them.
b. Method # 2 (The Automated Method)
The steps mentioned above can be great if you are looking to manually paraphrase a small piece of content. But, if the content in question happens to be large and big, there is another method that you can try out. And that is the automated method.
Unlike the manual method, the automated method is pretty short and quick. But, while short, the downside of using the automated method is that the results can sometimes be a tad disappointing. This issue can be mitigated, of course, if the software you use is smart and intelligent.
So, coming back to the point, the automated method of paraphrasing entails using a paraphrasing tool for the job. A paraphrasing tool is designed to make changes to the given content without human intervention. Some tools do provide the feature of manually editing the output once it is generated, but the changes they initially make are all done on their own.
There isn’t really a lot to automating paraphrasing. Once you pick a tool, the rest of the process is simple and straightforward. But, incidentally, picking a tool is more or less the most difficult part of the whole thing.
There are a lot of paraphrasing tools on the internet nowadays. But, since not all of them are equipped with state-of-the-art AI tech, the results provided by most of them are not very smart.
If you want to use some good paraphrasing tools, we recommend the following ones because of their smart and intelligent working:
We’ll show an example screenshot from all three of these tools so that you can look at how well they work:
Rephrase.info
Paraphraser.io
Quillbot.com
The one thing that is common in both the automated and the manual methods is the proofreading phase, just as you have to check the output when paraphrasing content manually. The same applies when you’re using a tool.
Conclusion
And that wraps it up.
Probably the biggest worry that students can have with regard to paraphrasing is its legality. While we did describe the situations in which paraphrasing can be fine and where it’s not, there’s a much simpler rule that you can use.
If you ever paraphrase something and don’t feel good about it, it’s probably a good idea to leave it out. Situations like this would arise if, for example, you’ve paraphrased a lot of content directly from a source without giving any credit whatsoever.
Other than that, as far as the actual paraphrasing goes, we hope you’ve learned a thing or two. If you can’t get your head around the manual steps, you can always take help from a good online tool.
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