Paraphrasing requires more than replacing a few words with synonyms. It is a skill that you will continue to develop throughout your studies. See below for a 5-minute video presentation of this handout.
Fortunately, there are steps you can follow to help you paraphrase well.
Here is an excerpt from the book "Climate Matters: Ethics in a Warming World" by Broome, J. (2012).
|
What is the Evidence for Global Warming?
Collecting evidence about climate change is a massive task, which is undertaken by the world’s community of climate scientists. We non-scientists have to rely on the research and judgement of the experts in sifting through the enormous volume of data, which is complex and sometimes conflicting. Fortunately, the state of scientific knowledge about climate change is summarized every five or six years in the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This is an extremely authoritative body. Its reports are written by the cooperative effort of hundreds of scientists, in consultations with virtually the whole community of climate scientists. In this, way, non- scientists have easy access to the conclusions of scientists. Most of the information contained in this chapter is taken from the latest report of the IPCC.
|
Let’s say that you are writing an essay arguing that public awareness is a major challenge in combatting climate change. And you want to incorporate the information from the highlighted sentence into your essay.
Step 1:Fully understand the paragraph. How does the paragraph as a whole relate to what you are writing about?
Step 2:Fully understand the sentence you intend to paraphrase. Re-read the sentence and think about how it applies to the real world.
Step 3:Change the word order to align with your paragraph focus. Here my paraphrase focuses on the enormous volume of data in climate science, so I have decided to put that part of the sentence first.
Because of the enormous volume of data, which is complex and sometimes conflictive, we non-scientists have to rely on the research and judgement of the experts.
Step 3: Check wording for grammar, directness, and clarity. Here I have removed the relative clause ,which.
Because the data concerning climate change is enormous, complex, and sometimes conflictive, we non-scientists have to rely on the research and judgement of expert climate scientists (Broome, 2012).
Step 4: Use appropriate synonyms of words and short phrases. This step can often feel the easiest, especially with the synonym finder on MS Word. But be careful. No two words are ever fully the same. Don’t use synonyms if you don’t fully understand how they should be placed in a sentence.
Because the data concerning climate change is expansive, complex and, at times, conflicting, the layperson is forced to rely on the conclusions and research of respected climate scientists (Broome, 2012).
Follow these four steps to ensure that your paraphrasing is professional and free from plagiarism.