Paraphrasing

WHAT IS PARAPHRASING?

Paraphrasing means to read or listen to someone else’s words and then be able to repeat them without using the exact same words, sentences or phrases. If the same text is repeated, this is then plagiarism. To paraphrase correctly means that you are able to represent the same meaning that someone else presented in their work, but by saying it in a different way.

This doesn’t mean that you just change some of the words in the sentences or that you replace key words with synonyms, you need to rewrite it all into your words.

Examples of paraphrasing: why should i cite sources?

ORIGINAL TEXT

“Life is pretty simple: You do some stuff. Most fails. Some works. You do more of what works. If it works big, others quickly copy it. Then you do something else. The trick is the doing something else. ” - Leonardo da Vinci, date unknown:

SUMMARISED TEXT

Life isn’t complicated. People do things which may succeed or fail. You are likely to continue to do the things that succeed, and if it is really successful, people might take your idea. So you go and work on something new. The most important thing in life is making sure you keep working on new things.

In this example we saw that the meaning was the same but that nearly every word was different. The order of the quote remained the same as well, so that the meaning of the phrase used by Da Vinci was not altered.