What is Paraphrasing?
Paraphrasing is the process of rewriting someone else’s ideas or words in your own language while keeping the context of the content same and without a lot of inputs from your end.
Paraphrasing can be a great way to include an interesting article or work by somebody else in your own content without quoting it directly. To paraphrase an article, thorough understanding of the contents of the article is required. So, it is advised to first read the article properly and then rewrite the same in your own words.
Now one may be tempted to quote somebody else’s work directly in their own article without paraphrasing it. Hence let us know why we should avoid copying or quoting other’s work in our article and try to paraphrase if we choose to include the ideas from other’s work.
Why is it required to Paraphrase?
There are numerous benefits of paraphrasing, rather than quoting somebody else’s work in one’s article directly.
- Paraphrasing helps avoid plagiarism.
- Paraphrasing helps to present the ideas of the former writer with a better approach and in one’s own words.
- Paraphrasing makes the writer appear more knowledgeable about various nuances related to the topic.
- Paraphrasing helps a writer to use the works of various experts of a particular field and combine all of their contributions along with his own understanding to deliver a very informative content for the reader.
Now, as the above points highlight the benefits of paraphrasing, one must be very careful to avoid plagiarism while paraphrasing someone else’s work.
How to avoid Plagiarism while Paraphrasing?
Plagiarism can prove to be detrimental to a student or writer’s hours of research and hard work towards writing a piece of content. If plagiarised content is detected, it may lead to a student failing in a subject and a writer getting heavily penalised by moderators.
Hence to avoid plagiarism, while paraphrasing any content, one can refer to the below mentioned tips:
- Change the formatting and writing style of the content.
- Change each sentence structure carefully to avoid any similarity with the original content.
- Changing the main keywords with similar meaning words would help.
For better understanding, let’s look at an example about how to paraphrase a content.
Original Content: The latest WHO data points to road accidents as being the leading cause of death among youth and children in the age group of 5 to 29 years. Ensuring safety standards of a car cannot be emphasised enough in our country as India accounts for the world’s highest number of road accidents, which claim about 1.5 lakh lives annually.
Paraphrased Content: According to the most recent WHO data, the number one cause of death for children and young adults between the age of 5 and 29 is traffic accidents. The importance of ensuring an automobile meets safety regulations cannot be overstated in our nation, as India leads the globe in traffic accidents, with over 1.5 lakh fatalities every year.
Steps of Paraphrasing
Following steps can act as stepping stones for anybody looking to paraphrase a content:
- Understand the context of the content: It is advised to read the content thoroughly to get a proper understanding of the content. Once the writer has got a good grasp of the content, it will be easy for him/her to prepare an outline and introduction in their own words.
- Keep yourself in place of their readers: By keeping yourself in place of their readers, it will be easier to understand, how a piece of content can be better written so as to provide more value and a better understanding to the readers can go a long way in paraphrasing a content in a more suitable way.
- Focus on replacing the words used in the original content with some other same meaning words, rather than just changing the structure of the sentence. Plagiarism checker tools look for similar keywords in the content in question with those on any piece of work on the internet. Hence carefully used synonymous words can keep you out of the trouble.
- Add some extra information in your content. Some additional information in your content, which is missing in the original content would indicate that your piece of work holds more water than the original one. It would add more authenticity to your content.
How to paraphrase different types of content?
Paraphrasing can be done with any type of content. The above-mentioned steps are more or less applicable to all the type of content. Students generally wonder “How to paraphrase an essay”, “How to paraphrase a Quote”, “How to paraphrase a Complex text”, “How to paraphrase a Poem”. Keeping their worries at bay, they should use the same steps to paraphrase any content they are working on. With proper understanding of the content, they should rewrite it in their own words adding a few extra points which would be really beneficial for their readers. The final piece of paraphrased content may come up better than the original content.
After the content is ready, citations must be included in the end. Citations are provided in a content to give credit to the original sources from where any kind of information has been collected to write the content. Although not quoted directly from any source, still it is mandatory to provide citations so that readers can refer to the actual sources for better understanding of the topic. To learn how to add citations, head over to our comprehensive guide to add citations in a content.
FAQs
Is paraphrasing allowed?
Paraphrasing is just like collecting a piece of content from somewhere which seems to be valuable for your content, and rephrasing it in your own words. There is nothing wrong with paraphrasing bits of content and using it in your own content. But one needs to be careful about not to go overboard with it. Paraphrasing a complete content and using it in your own content can lead to plagiarism.
What are the rules of paraphrasing?
- Read the content thoroughly and get a proper understanding of the content.
- Rewrite it in your own words to provide more value and a better understanding to the readers.
- Replace the words used in the original content with their synonyms.
- Add some extra information in your content, which can provide more value to the reader.
- Change the formatting and writing style of the content.
- Change each sentence structure carefully to avoid any similarity with the original content.
Can I get help from a professional academic expert to paraphrase a content?
Our Academic experts can guide you through the process of paraphrasing any content and tailor make it for your school or college assignments. They have years of experience writing assignments for students and help them score excellent grades.
Can I do paraphrasing online?
There are some websites that help you detect plagiarised content and make some changes in the content. But the efficacy of those tools are not reliable enough. It is advised to go through the indicated plagiarised content, and make the changes yourself, rather than completely relying on the tools, as those tools tend to change the content with another content copied from some other source. Often after the changes have been made by the tool, the context of the content appears to be completely different than what was actually intended by the author.