Paraphrasing Tips in Academic Writing-2

To avoid plagiarism, you should get to know a number of paraphrasing tips to ensure you use your own words and NOT using the words from the original source.

As discussed in the previous post, the great ideas that come to the researchers’ minds motivate them to do new research and reflect them in new books or papers. However, this process may be challenging; you may find many individuals who try to steal others’ ideas and research and publish them in their own name and take advantage of them.

Plagiarism is “the use of others’ published and unpublished ideas or words without attribution or permission and presenting them as new and original rather than derived from an existing source”, according to WAME Publication Ethics Committee.

To avoid plagiarism, we can apply a number of useful methods, including paraphrasing.

Paraphrasing means rewriting someone else’s ideas in your own words, with the meaning of the original text untouched. Remember, paraphrasing does not mean removing words from paragraphs and replacing them with new ones; rather, paraphrasing is actually expressing what you have understood from a text or manuscript. This is very important in rewriting ISI papers and any disregard for it may cause many authors to commit plagiarism.

Note that even when you paraphrase using your own words, you still must provide in-text citations, according to the formatting requirements — APA, AMA, MLA, etc.

In this post you will be presented with tips and techniques for doing an effective paraphrasing:

Paraphrasing Tips

For any kind of text to be paraphrased, every writer should be aware of five important steps:

1. Read the passage multiple times to fully understand the meaning: when you read a passage, you should first grasp the content as a whole and avoid pausing to write down specific ideas or phrases.
2. Note down key concepts: take some notes and list key terms of the original passage.
3. Rewrite: when you grasped the whole meaning of the passage and get the main ideas of it, rewrite your version of the text without looking at the original, using your own terms and words.
4. Compare: when you prepared your paraphrased text, compare it with the original passage and make any necessary changes to ensure your version covers the main parts and intent of the source material.
5. In-text citation: provide the readers with the sources where you found the idea in the reference section of your manuscript, using in-text citation.

With the five above-mentioned steps in mind, now you should study three major tips and techniques to effective paraphrasing when writing your manuscript for any purpose:

1. Use synonyms and related words

One way to paraphrase a text is to use synonyms and related words which proves you know a wide enough range of vocabulary. You can use a thesaurus to find synonyms, but don’t overdo it! You are not supposed to remove all the words used in the original text; it’s perfectly acceptable and often necessary to use some of the same words as the original text. Be careful when using synonyms to see if the synonym perfectly matches the word you are changing.

2. Change the structure of a sentence

By changing the voice of the sentence (active voice to passive and passive voice to active), you can change the general structure of a sentence.

Using synonyms and related words for paraphrasing an original text, you may overlook changing and substituting a few words of the original, heavily relying on the structure and vocabulary of the original source. This failed attempt to paraphrase is called “patchwriting” and happens when a paraphrased text is very close to the original one, and this is a form of plagiarism! To properly paraphrase, you must also change the sentence structure.

To change the structure of a sentence, you can change the voice of the source text, break up long sentences, combine short ones, expand phrases for clarity, or shorten them for conciseness,

3. Change the order of words

You can change the order of the words in a sentence with keeping the meaning of the sentence untouched. Word order change in a sentence is almost easier than finding the synonyms. When you want to change the order, you may need to add a few words to complete the sentence.

Here are two suggestions to change the order of words to make correct sentences:

• If the main sentence has two or more clauses, change the order of the clauses.
• If the main sentence has an adjective and a noun, change the adjective to the relative clause.

References

https://wame.org/recommendations-on-publication-ethics-policies-for-medical-journals