1. Researching, Writing and Presenting Information - A How To Guide: How to paraphrase

What is paraphrasing?

Paraphrasing is expressing information or ideas from other sources in your own words. Paraphrasing is NOT patch-writing - replacing words with synonyms or rearranging the structure of sentences. When paraphrasing, you must still acknowledge the original source used to gain the information. 

What is the difference between paraphrasing and quoting?

Paraphrasing is different to quoting because quotes are extracts from a source that are the same word for word and appear in between quotation marks " ...". Like paraphrasing, when quoting you must acknowledge the original source used to gain the information.

How to paraphrase - 

• Read the original source carefully more than once to make sure that you fully understand it.
• Cover the original text and rewrite the main idea/s in your own words.
• Write the paraphrase in your own words, how could you rephrase it while retaining the meaning?
• Check your paraphrasing against the original source. Does it present the same idea/s?
• Record the referencing details of the original source so that you can provide an in-text reference.

When you have correctly paraphrased information you still need to in text reference it.​

Examples:​

• Ball and Gready (2006, pp. 18-19) discuss the human rights violations in the 20th century as some of the worst in history.​

• The human rights violations in the 20th century were some of the worst in history (Ball & Gready 2006, pp. 18-19).​