Re-writing another person’s words so that the original meaning of their idea is maintained, but the structure and words you use are quite different from theirs.

When you paraphrase, the words and structures you use should sound like something you would normally say or write.

Paraphrasing is not producing a direct copy of another persons’ ideas or work.

• Presenting the ideas and information of others in your own voice. :

• Not necessarily presenting the original text in an elaborate way, but in a way that flows with your expression.

• If you want to write very closely to the original text, then you may need to consider whether it’s worthy of a direct quote – or if you have to work more at expressing it in your own voice.

• Transferring ideas sentence per sentence.

• Keeping identical sentence structure

• Just changing words from the original

Summarising is when you give an overview of the author’s key ideas as a whole, or provide an overview of a topic.

A summary is usually shorter than the original piece of writing. It might state the ideas of a paragraph in one simple sentence.

A summary tells you about the whole passage.

If you paraphrase well, you will not only demonstrate that you have understood the original content to your lecturer or professor, you will also be demonstrating that you know how it relates to your ideas.

When you paraphrase you need to think about another person’s words and how/why they relate to your thesis statement.

Quoting - when to quote rather than paraphrase

• You want to add the power of an author’s words to support your argument

• You want to disagree with an author’s argument

• You are comparing and contrasting specific points of view

• You want to highlight particularly powerful or effective phrases.

You want to use your own “voice” to present information

• You want to incorporate the author’s ideas into your own writing

• You want to avoid over-quotation!

• You want to establish the background to a topic

• You want to offer an overview of a topic

• You want to describe common knowledge from several sources about a topic

• You want to communicate the main ideas of a single source.