Picture this: while researching you’ve discovered the perfect piece of content to incorporate in your essay but you’re struggling to rewrite it without changing its meaning. This is why paraphrasing can feel tricky and in this blog, I’ll be sharing what is paraphrasing and the 4 key tips you can follow to paraphrase high-quality content in your next essay.
What is Paraphrasing?
Paraphrasing is not just about rephrasing, swapping words, and changing tenses to avoid plagiarism, and while it may serve the purpose it does not add value to your essay. So what is paraphrasing exactly? True paraphrasing develops your voice and allows you to condense different sources of information to structure a new point of view, let’s call it synthesizing.
4 Tips to Follow for Paraphrasing
Let’s address the elephant in the room: how do you paraphrase? Follow these 4 easy steps to quickly learn the art of paraphrasing for your next essay:
1. Basic Paraphrasing
Basic paraphrasing is about swapping words, rephrasing, changing tenses and parts of speech. By following a few guidelines shared below you should be able to seamlessly paraphrase at this level:
- Swappping Words: Replace words in the original source with appropriate synonyms in your essay
- Rephrasing: Reorder different setences and combine different phrases in your essay to change the formation of sentences. But be careful if this is not done right it could lead to accidental plagiarism. Don’t worry you can always check for similarity using Skyline’s plagiarism checker.
- Paraphrasing tool: Change text in various modes using QuillBot’s paraphrasing tool to paraphrase text based on your assignment guidelines.
- Parts of speech: Change a verb to a noun or an adjective to an adverb so that the construction of a sentence is altered e.g a cat’s food would change to the food of a cat.
2. Synthesizing
Synthesizing develops your voice and allows you to condense or expand on different sources of information to structure a new point of view in your essay.
- Introduce the sources: Add your perspective about the sources that are used in your essay to provide context to the readers.
- Use multiple sources: Gather information from various sources to support the arguments presented in your essay.
- Summarize information: Condense information from competing sources and choose the relevant information for your essay to construct a clear narrative.
- Present your argument: Build on the current narratives and organize it in a new pooint of view so that you contribute to the body of literature available.
3. Tone Adoption
Adapting the tone of your writing to your audience in your essay is a critical part of paraphrasing.
- Know your audience: Understand the persona of your audience and adjust your language, style, structure to your audience’s tastes.
- Consistency in tone: The tone in your essay should be coherent throughout. Inconsistencies in tone could be reflected in your essay if you use different sources where tones of authors aren’t harmonized.
4. Source Citation
Paraphrasing changes another person’s words into your own words but you must reference the source of the text to maintain academic integrity. To cite paraphrased text parenthetical citation should be used at the end of the text. However, if you have a number of paraphrased sentences from the same source one citation at the end of the passage is enough.
I know it’s painful to perfect citations and most online tools provide AI-generated citations which actually do not match the citation style guideline provided in your essay prompt. Therefore, Skyline has introduced an advanced proofreading and editing service that detects and corrects AI citations and refines your essay to meet the highest academic standards.
This review, I hope, increased your understanding of what is paraphrasing and provided you with actionable steps to easily paraphrase in your next essay. It takes years of practice to learn how to paraphrase but if you follow these four tips I’m sure you’ll be one step closer to mastering it.