Writing: Paraphrasing

Paraphrasing is a very important skill in your academic writing. Firstly it helps you avoid plagiarising what someone else has written, and secondly it shows your wide vocabulary.

What is paraphrasing?

It means you change the wording of a text so that it is significantly different from the original source, without changing the meaning. Effective paraphrasing demonstrates that you have understood what you have read.

Paraphrasing usually goes along with summarizing in essay writing. Summarizing is when you reduce information to a suitable length. Paraphrasing is when you rewrite the relevant information.

 Look at this sentence for example:

“There has been much debate about the reasons for the industrial revolution happening in the eighteenth-century Britain rather than in France or Germany.”

This could be paraphrased as:

“Why the industrial revolution occurred in Britain in the eighteenth century, instead of on the continent, has been the subject of considerable discussion.”

Remember Good Paraphrasing usually includes:

1. Has a different structure to the original

2. Has mainly different vocabulary

3. Retains the same meaning

4. Keeps some phrases from the original that are in common use. Eg. “Industrial revolution” or“eighteenth century”

Now consider how you would paraphrase this paragraph.

“There are many tribes in the Amazon, which have never made contact with the outside world. Until five weeks ago we didn’t know how many tribes there were.  Discoveries made by satellite imagery have shown that there are approximately 30 separate tribes which have never had any contact with the outside world.”

Can you rewrite it?

A suggested answer is at the bottom.

“As reported in Amazonia magazine, a lot of Amazon tribes remain isolated from the rest of humanity until just last month when findings by satellite uncovered about 30 tribes living in such isolation"

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