Paraphrasing and summarising sources
Paraphrasing and summarising are important skills for academic writing.
Why paraphrase?
- You may want to target a specific audience and use language to suit
- Shows you’ve understood your reading
- Keeps your writing style consistent, in your voice
What makes a 'good' paraphrase?
- It is sufficiently changed from the original
- It retains the original meaning
- It is roughly the same length as the original
- It will include an in-text citation
- It should include your own comments on the author’s ideas
- It will be linked to the rest of the text
- You shouldn’t paraphrase complete paragraphs
Steps to successful paraphrasing
- Read the original passage/sentence and make sure you understand the meaning and context
- Cover the text and make notes
- Write your paraphrase from your notes without looking at the original
- Compare with the original and make sure it is sufficiently changed without altering the meaning
- Make sure you’ve added an in-text citation
Ways of paraphrasing
There are two main ways of paraphrasing.
1. Changing the sentence structure
One way to do this is by changing active voice to passive voice or vice versa.
Original: PDP [Personal Development Planning] can have a positive impact on your academic achievement (Cottrell, 2015, 11).
This sentence is active, with PDP as the subject.
Passive: A positive impact on your academic achievement can be achieved by use of PDP (Cottrell, 2015, 11).
The object (a positive impact) becomes the subject of the passive sentence.
If a sentence is already passive, you can change it to active if you know who or what the agent (doer of the action) is.
Passive: Radium was discovered in 1898.
Active: The Curies discovered radium in 1898.
(Note: this may not always be appropriate, depending on the context.)
The order of the sentence could also be changed as follows:
Original: “When engaged upon a long-term project, such as gaining a degree or developing a career path, it is important to stay focused on what you want to achieve” (Cottrell, 2015, 50).
Reordered: It is important to stay focused on what you want to achieve when engaged upon a long-term project, such as gaining a degree or developing a career path (Cottrell, 2015, 50).
Changing the sentence structure alone, however, is not really sufficient to be a successful paraphrase.
2. Changing the words
You also need to look at the vocabulary and if/how we can change it.
Some words (which are not technical or very specific) can be changed if you retain the original meaning.
A thesaurus can be useful for this but be careful not to use words which are too informal and remember that similar words often have different connotations.
“In recent decades there has been much consideration of types of learner and styles of doing this – such as visual, or auditory, or kinaesthetic learning styles” (Cottrell, 2015, 68).
- Which words do you think could be changed in this sentence?
- Which would you not want to change?
- You would probably not want to change visual, auditory, or kinaesthetic, as they are specific terms related to learning styles
“In recent decades there has been much consideration of types of learner and styles of doing this – such as visual, or auditory, or kinaesthetic learning styles” (Cottrell, 2015, 68).
‘Consideration’ could be changed to ‘attention’, ‘debate’, ‘deliberation’, for example ‘Styles’ could be ‘approaches’, ‘ways’… Over the past few decades, there has been a great deal of deliberation around different learners and approaches to learning – for example, visual, or auditory, or kinaesthetic (Cottrell, 2015, 68).
Successful paraphrasing
Again, on its own, this is probably not enough. Ideally, we should use a combination of changing the structure and the words, for example:
There has been much deliberation over the past few decades around different learners using visual, auditory, or kinaesthetic approaches to learning (Cottrell, 2015, 68).
Note that the original meaning has been retained
Summarising
The steps to a successful summary are very similar to paraphrasing.
The difference is that you are reading a longer passage and condensing it into fewer words.
You may not need a page number in your citation if, for example, you are summarising an author’s idea from a whole publication.
Example texts taken from:
Cottrell, S. (2015) Skills for success: personal development and employability [ebook], 3rd edition. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. [accessed 13 June 2018].