Paraphrasing is restating an author's ideas in your own words by changing both the language and the sentence structure of the original passage. This is the most common way to incorporate information borrowed from another author into your academic work, but it can be tricky to master--paraphrasing takes lots of practice.
When paraphrasing:
- Restate the original author's writing or ideas in your own different words.
- Maintain the author's original ideas and meaning as carefully as possible.
- Change the wording and sentence structure to your writing style, but don't add your ideas and meaning.
- Avoid replacing words in the original sentence with synonyms.
- Try to keep your paraphrase about the same length as the original.
- Work with only a few sentences at a time.
- Cite the sources used and no quotation marks.
