Paraphrasing

Paraphrasing is when you use your own words to explain something that you learned from a source. Paraphrasing can be a useful way to clearly explain the meaning of information you uncovered through your research. It’s a good way to describe what you’ve learned and also help the reader understand the significance of the information. It is NOT rearranging the words or replacing just a few words in the sentence. Paraphrasing is a common writing technique, but it’s also where many students unintentionally plagiarize.


Students unintentionally plagiarize because they:

  • Take a sentence from a source and rearrange the words. 
  • Use the thesaurus tool to change a few words in a sentence.

To do a good job of paraphrasing, you have to make sure you are using only your words, not the author’s. First, read the original source and think about it. Make a few notes of what you think it means. After that, try explaining the author’s ideas in your own words. It’s helpful if you wait a little while between reading the source and trying to paraphrase it so that the author’s words aren’t quite so fresh in your mind. If there’s a word or phrase that you keep repeating when you try to paraphrase, then you probably should just quote it (with quotation marks and a citation).

Example

Paraphrasing a Source

A magazine article by L. Mundy in Atlantic titled “Why is Silicon Valley so awful to women?” is the featured source for this example. The following section of the article is highlighted for paraphrasing:

Why is Silicon Valley so awful to women? excerpt Download Why is Silicon Valley so awful to women? excerpt

In an APA Style paper, a paraphrase of this section of the source source could be written as follows:

A former Facebook employee says the company does a good job of making it seem like a great place to work, a company that’s friendly and equitable to women, but she says women are often not included in social situations in which important company ideas and products are being introduced (Mundy, 2017, p. 71).