Paraphrasing Strategies

• Locate the individual statements or major idea units in the original.
• Change the order of ideas, maintaining the logical connections among them.
• Substitute synonyms for words in the original, making sure the language in your paraphrase is appropriate for your audience.
• Combine and divide sentences as necessary.

What Is an Introductory Phrase? An introductory phrase is like a clause, but it doesn’t have its own subject and verb; it relies on the subject and verb in the main clause. It sets the stage for the main part of the sentence.

An appositive can come before or after the main noun and it can be at the beginning, middle, or end of a sentence, as long as it sits beside the noun it defines. As a noun phrase, an appositive does not have a subject or predicate, and is not a complete thought.

✓ A paraphrase is used for presenting an author’s ideas in your own words. Characteristics of Effective Paraphrases: ✓ Accurately relays the information from the original text in your own words. ✓ Provides the reader with the source of the information.

When you use your own words to convey information from an original source, you are paraphrasing. While paraphrases do not require quotation marks, they do require citations.

Paraphrasing is repeating in your words what you interpreted someone else to be saying. Paraphrasing is powerful means to further the understanding of the other person and yourself, and can greatly increase the impact of another’s comments. It can translate comments so that even more people can understand them.

The difference between paraphrasing and reflective listening is that in paraphrasing you are only summarizing what the victim has said. With reflective listening, you are going beyond summarizing to identifying feelings that the person may not have identified, but their words and attitudes point to such feelings.

Paraphrasing tips

• Start your first sentence at a different point from that of the original source.
• Use synonyms (words that mean the same thing)
• Change the sentence structure (e.g. from active to passive voice)
• Break the information into separate sentences.

Paraphrasing is basically formulating someone else’s idea using your own words, but without changing the meaning of the original idea. Paraphrasing is an effective strategy for writers since they could use the idea of someone else but maintaining their own voice in the piece of writing.

Steps to effective paraphrasing and summarising:

1. Read your text/paragraph and ensure that you understand it.
2. Write down your ideas without looking at the original.
3. Use synonyms or change the word order of your sentence.
4. Compare with the original to see whether you are conveying the same meaning.

Here are a few tips on effective paraphrasing:

• Read the original text several times till you understand the meaning very clearly.
• Without looking at the source, jot down in points whatever you have understood from the text.
• Rewrite the material using your own words, but without changing the meaning.

Step-by-step paraphrasing

1. Decide what the key information is, for the purposes of your discussion.
2. Change the order of the ideas and the words.
3. Change the word form/grammatical form if necessary.
4. Use synonyms if appropriate, but do not change any specific terminology.

Paraphrases

1. children = youngsters, minors. an infant or a toddler is not a strong paraphrase for child because it refers to only very young children.
2. teenager = juvenile, adolescent, youth, minor.

Why use summarizing? It helps students learn to determine essential ideas and consolidate important details that support them. It enables students to focus on key words and phrases of an assigned text that are worth noting and remembering.