Paraphrasing

Paraphrasing Guide

How to avoid plagiarism

  • Decide on keywords to use for research.

  • Choose the best place to look for information e.g. Britannica, the Library, Google.

  • Skim read results pages and find sources with information relevant to your research.

  • Paraphrase the relevant information from each source into your notes doc and add a url for each source.

  • If copying and pasting useful material to quote later, use โ€œcolour and quotesโ€ to identify it as copied.

  • Add paraphrased material into assignment and add it to MyBib so that you can later add it to your Works Cited page.

How to paraphrase in 5 easy steps

  1. Read the text that you are paraphrasing carefully until you really understand it. You might need to reread several times

  2. Are there any words e.g.nouns you canโ€™t change?

  3. Try and remember the text without looking at it. Close the tab in your browser or switch to another tab. Donโ€™t switch back to the original until you have finished.

  4. Paraphrase the text aloud with a partner if possible, or imagine doing this. Use your own words, like telling a story. Write your paraphrase down in your notes with a reference or URL so that you can find it again later.

  5. Check your paraphrase with the original text. Is the meaning the same?

Plagiarism

Source: My Love from the Star, Episode 2, 2013

6 Rโ€™s of Paraphrasing

  • Read & Reread

  • Rethink

  • Restate

  • Rearrange

  • Reword

  • Review

How to plagiarise (Donโ€™t do this!)

Do you do this? Have you ever done this before, or have you done some of these things? Be honest!

  • Copy and paste assignment question into Google

  • Click on the first link on the results page (usually wikipedia)

  • Copy and paste useful paragraphs to a Google Doc that you call โ€œNotesโ€

  • Copy some useful paragraphs to final assignment document

  • Change a few words to synonyms

  • Make a Works Cited page with some websites that look good and hand it in

Paraphrasing toolkit

Use these techniques to paraphrase more complicated technical texts.

  • Combine sentences.

  • Remove details that are not relevant.

  • Change sentence structure.

  • Change voice.

  • Use different forms of a word.

  • Use synonyms. Note that only replacing a few words for synonyms is not paraphrasing.

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