Paraphrasing or “indirect quotation” is putting source text in your own words and altering the sentence structure to avoid using the quotation marks required in direct quotation. Paraphrasing is the preferred way of using a source when the original wording isn’t important. This way, you can incorporate the source’s ideas so they’re stylistically consistent with the rest of your document and thus better tailored to the needs of your audience (presuming the original was tailored for a different audience with different needs). Also, paraphrasing a source into your own words proves your advanced understanding of the source text.

A paraphrase must faithfully represent the source text by containing the same ideas as in the original in about the same length. As a matter of good writing, however, you should try to streamline your paraphrase so that it tallies fewer words than the source passage while still preserving the original meaning.

Paraphrase to Keep a Consistent Voice

Original: “Hand gestures, like other forms of nonverbal communication, can change the meaning of our words as well as carry meanings totally by themselves.  Unless we understand the meanings attached to certain hand gestures in the different cultures, we are likely to send and receive unintended messages when dealing with people from other cultures. When two ordinary citizens from two different cultures miscommunicate through hand gestures, the result can be embarrassment or hard feelings” (Ferraro 125).

Paraphrase: Both body language and words are used to convey meaning.  Movements such as hand gestures can alter the meaning of spoken words, or be used alone to convey meaning.  If we don’t understand the meaning a person from another culture intends to convey through their hand gestures, and if that person doesn’t understand the meaning of ours, there’s a good chance we’ll misunderstand each other and feel ill at ease or possibly offended (Ferraro 125).

Paraphrase, Don’t Patchwrite

Notice that the paraphrased example uses different sentence structure as well as original writing. In other words, take care not to just replace or change out strands of words for synonyms. Completing such a task is known as patchwriting, and patchwriting is considered poor form (and in some contexts can even be seen as plagiarism).

Original: “Hand gestures, like other forms of nonverbal communication, can change the meaning of our words as well as carry meanings totally by themselves” (Ferraro 125).

Patchwritten: Hand movements, like other nonverbal signals, have the ability to alter the definitions of our words as well as carry meanings entirely on their own (Ferraro 125).

While the bolded words were changed, there are patches of material that remain the same. Even when a writer adds a citation here (like above), the material is still considered poorly rewritten and needs  to be restructured to create a stronger paraphrase.

Paraphrase to Break Down a Concept

Paraphrasing helps readers see a new perspective on a source. When an original source is difficult to understand, it might be helpful to paraphrase it. Here, for instance, a passage from Diego Rivera’s essay “The Revolutionary Spirit in Modern Art” is being paraphrased:

Original: “And now we come to the question of propaganda. (All painters have been propagandists or else they have not been painters. Giotto was a propagandist of the spirit of Christian charity, the weapon of the Franciscan monks of his time against feudal oppression. Breughel was a propagandist of the struggle of the Dutch artisan petty bourgeoisie against feudal oppression. Every artist who has been worth anything in art has been such a propagandist.) The familiar accusation that propaganda ruins art finds its source in bourgeois prejudice” (Rivera 424).

Paraphrase: In “The Revolutionary Spirit in Modern Art,” Diego Rivera writes that he’s not afraid of his art becoming propaganda, because art has always been propaganda, insofar as it makes an argument for a particular way of thinking (424).

DON’T Paraphrase to Give Your Own Spin

Paraphrasing is not commentary. It is important to recall that when you paraphrase, you should refrain from including your personal opinions in the content. Even though you are writing in your own voice, paraphrasing is not sharing your own thoughts. Instead, your goal is to objectively share what the original author intended to say. Where appropriate, of course, the paraphrase or summary may be followed by your own reading, critique, or interpretation. Be sure to note the difference between parts of your essay where you’re paraphrasing and parts where you’re interpreting. Consider this claim:

In “The Revolutionary Spirit in Modern Art,” Diego Rivera says that all the great art throughout history—basically everything that matters in Western Culture—is just worthless propaganda for Capitalism.  He wants to replace Bruegel’s The Procession to Calvary with murals of tractors.

Although this passage contains some elements from Rivera’s essay, which does indeed mention propaganda, Capitalism, and Pieter Bruegel the Elder, it’s less a paraphrase of Rivera’s ideas than a negative caricature of them. The writer obviously disagrees with Rivera, and sets out to paint Rivera’s essay in the worst positive light. While this kind of attack is quite common in some genres (such as editorials by political pundits, who often exaggerate the claims of the opposition), it is usually not acceptable in academic writing. To disagree with an argument in in academic writing, you should paraphrase the argument accurately first, then give your critique.

DON’T Forget to Cite

Remember, you must still cite when you paraphrase. Even though you have used your own words, your development includes ideas that may not be your own. When you use someone else’s ideas, you should still include a citation to help readers see the material’s origin. Not only do citations show readers that you are borrowing someone else’s ideas, but they also help to add credibility for readers, and thereby increase your credibility as a writer.

Paraphrasing, Step-By-Step

Paraphrase easily by breaking down the task into these seven steps:

1. Read and re-read the source-text passage so that you thoroughly understand each point it makes. If it’s a long passage, you might want to break it up into digestible chunks. If you’re unsure of the meaning of any of the words, look them up in a dictionary; you can even just type the word into the Google search bar, hit Enter, and a definition will appear, along with results of other online dictionary pages that define the same word.
2. Look away and get your mind off the target passage. Process some different information for a while.
3. Without looking back at the source text, repeat its main points as you understood them—not from memorizing the exact words, but as you would explain the same ideas in different words out loud to a friend.
4. Still without looking back at the source text, jot down that spoken wording and tailor the language so that it’s stylistically appropriate for your audience; edit and proofread your written version to make it grammatically correct in a way that perhaps your spoken-word version wasn’t.
5. Now compare your written paraphrase version to the original to ensure that:

• You’ve accurately represented the meaning of the original without:
  • Deleting any of the original points
  • Adding any points of your own
  • Distorting any of the ideas so they mean something substantially different from those in the original, or even take on a different character because you use words that, say, put a positive spin on something neutral or negative in the original
• You haven’t repeated any two identical words from the original in a row

6. If any two words from the original remain, go further in changing those expressions by using a thesaurus in combination with a dictionary. When you enter a word into a thesaurus, it gives you a list of synonyms, which are different words that mean the same thing as the word you enter into it.

• Be careful, however; many of those words will mean the same thing as the word you enter into the thesaurus in certain contexts but not in others, especially if you enter a homonym, which is a word that has different meanings in different parts of speech.
  • For instance, the noun party can mean a group that is involved in something serious (e.g., a third-party software company in a data-collection process), but the verb party means something you do on a wild Saturday night out with friends; it can also function as an adjective related to the verb (e.g., party trick, meaning a trick performed at a party).

• Whenever you see synonymous words listed in a thesaurus and they look like something you want to use but you don’t know what they mean exactly, always look them up to ensure that they mean what you hope they mean; if not, move on to the next synonym until you find one that captures the meaning you intend. Doing this can save your reader the confusion and you the embarrassment of obvious thesaurus-driven diction problems (poor word choices).

7. Cite your source. Just because you didn’t put quotation marks around the words doesn’t mean that you don’t have to cite your source.