How to Paraphrase in English Academic Writing

the real question is we know what paraphrasing is what we want to know is how to do it uh and it sounds simple but it's actually not that simple because there are a few things we have to think about so let's go through these little tips and Concepts and I'll try to be as clear as possible okay let's this is my definition and it's it's not that different from what you just told me but just my word so to repeat something written or spoken using different words or different language but here's a trick often in a simpler and shorter form that makes the original meaning clearer and I would also say when you paraphrase you can change the tone you can make something funny you can make something written funny make it serious you keep the main idea but you can change it into your words but also your tone it's a bit more of an advanced idea but it is possible so you could take something very serious and paraphrase it to make it sound funny you're allowed to do that but for now let's just focus on this basic idea why would you paraphrase well one reason is to make it simpler and shorter right but there's a few things we have to think about when we do this especially if you're reading something that somebody else wrote and you're going to paraphrase it you have a couple of responsibilities so there are basically three sometimes four key responsibilities of a parap phrase and what I mean is these are things you must do you must think about these it's your responsibility when you paraphrase your responsibility number one you should change the language a lot okay don't just change one word you have a responsibility to change the language a lot to make it your language especially later if you do uh academic writing in college this is very important if you borrow someone's words from a book and use it use their ideas in your in your essay you have to change the language a lot not a little bit a lot it has to become your language your writing your words and I'll show you how to do that okay so responsibility number one you need to change the paraphrase a lot you need to change the language a lot but even though you change the language a lot you have to keep the main idea so change the language keep the idea also if you have really specific terms or vocabulary and numbers can't change those okay so I call these key terms or key words so for example if your topic is pizza and you write a whole essay about pizza use the word pizza that is your topic keyword don't use a synonym for that right identifying the most important words that really relate to your topic you want to repeat those words you want to change other words but you want to preserve those key terms so if you read a book all about pizza and you're going to paraphrase it use the word Pizza it's too important if you start talking about something else if you change the word Pizza to I don't know like bread cheese and tomato pie sounds like a completely different topic right so responsibility number two is important preserve or keep the key wordss the key terms and data numbers statistics you can't change those otherwise you change the whole idea we want to keep the basic idea okay so this is tricky right now we have two responsibilities we have to change the language but we have to keep the idea the same or similar have to preserve the idea It's Tricky but I'll show you how to do it number three this is for academic writing in college you must site your source so for example if you're reading a what do we have here we have a let's say we have a big academic book and we borrow some right some idea from here and we paraph phase it and put it in our essay whoever reads your essay needs to know where you got that information especially if it involves special research or studies your teacher knows you didn't do the research you're too young you have to site your Source now we're not going to talk about that today you'll learn that when you learn academic writing but that's really important because this person who wrote the book they they spent a lot of years researching that information you can't just steal it right so paraphrasing is a way of borrowing ideas and turning it into your language so it's your language but it's not your idea you borrowed the idea and ideas are property somebody else has the right to that property okay so number three we're not going to talk about today but it's something you will encounter later okay so let's say that number one and number two are most important for us change the language a lot but keep the main idea preserve it if the person in the book has a good idea and you want to paraphrase it it's because you like their idea but you want to put it in your words how do we do that okay other people may have different ideas about this but I've taught writing for so long that I've sort of recognized the patterns and I believe there are six techniques that you can use to paraphrase you can use one alone you could use number one and number four you can use all of them together but you need to use these I recommend as you get practice with them use them all together use a combination of them use technique number one and number three maybe number two and number four combine okay the six paraphrasing techniques and remember what we're trying to do we're trying to change the language but keep the idea number one the most obvious one I think you all know this use synonyms change one or two words in a sentence right um if you don't know a synonym you can look up a word in the thesaurus I think we've talked about a thesaurus it's a kind of dictionary for synonyms there's online versions of them uh maybe you have one in the library I don't know but thesaurus is a dictionary of synonyms so you can change one or two of the words and that will change the language but it'll keep the main idea right but won't change the language a lot and I told you you need to change the language a lot it'll change the language a little bit therefore we cannot use number one only it's not enough the other thing is again we don't want to use synonyms for the keywords the most important words of your topic if you're writing about pizza use the word Pizza repeat it right if we're talking about education of students we want to use that word education we don't want to change it students is a very specific kind of person we don't want to change that those are key words of our topic we can change other words we can change grammar words like verbs right but the key words of your topic don't change those okay here's an example the tiger quickly disappeared into the trees we want to keep that idea but we want to change the language so we're going to use a synonym in this case our topic is Tiger so we don't want to call it the big cat because there are many kinds of big cats if we're talking about tigers we use the word Tiger but we can change a verb easily the tiger vanished into the forest and we can change the word trees Forest right the same idea is is preserved here so we've changed the verb we did not change the main keyword which is Tiger trees Forest that's not important for our topic but the word tiger is so don't change that okay that's that's a slightly different sentence now it's not super different but it's different enough with just two words changed okay so synonyms are powerful but these two sentences are quite different so that's good but you know if we have a whole paragraph changing synonyms won't be enough right so this is why we need six techniques not just one let's look at number two so technique number one use synonyms I think we all know this technique number two change the verb to negative or change the negative to positive sorry that's incomplete change the negative to positive so we know about positive and negative verbs we talked about that earlier I like pizza I do not like pizza so you can change a sentence a lot by changing the verb to negative so for example if I said if the sentence is I do not like pizza that's a negative sentence that's the one I'm that's the one I read in the book I want to paraphrase that I can change do not like to a positive grammar I hate pizza right so change the negative structure negative grammar to positive grammar using a word that meaning is negative that's a technique or if you want to paraphrase that you can change that to uh I do not eat pizza ever right I do not eat I hate Pizza I do not eat pizza ever it's obvious that I hate it so changing the verb grammar from negative to positive or positive to negative is a great way to change the sentence the meaning is kept though there's no difference really between I hate Pizza and I do not eat pizza ever or I never eat pizza the meaning is really the same the the bottom line is you don't eat pizza we saw this example earlier right the negative sentence I do not like pizza if you want to paraphrase that you can say I hate Pizza same meaning really I do not like or I hate pizza but the grammar is now positive grammar right or you could say I dislike Pizza dislike the meaning is negative right it means you don't like pizza but the way the grammar works is there's no not or do it's a positive grammar so we can change a sentence from negative grammar to positive grammar or we can change change it a positive sentence like this I swim every day we can change that to a negative sentence sorry I swim every day that's positive grammar negative would be I never miss a swim I never miss it that tells us the same information it tells us that every chance you have you swim so change the grammar from negative to positive or positive to negative that's paraphrasing we keep the same meaning right the meaning is the same but we're changing the grammar structure but you notice also we keep the keywords Pizza we're not going to call it bread tomato cheese pie we're calling it pizza here I use the verb swim that's the main idea so we don't want to change that word I never miss a swim if the focus of your writing is swim keep that word change other words okay now this takes practice but it's good practice for using negative and positive grammar negative grammar I do not positive grammar I do so we can change the verb here's an example here's the original one the nervous student was awake all all night so this is a positive sentence right was awake it's past tense but it's not a negative structure we don't have not here we don't have never positive grammar let's use a negative grammar to make the same idea the nervous student didn't sleep all night okay we keep the main idea the student the nervous student that's a pretty specific idea let's keep that but let's change the verb structure from a positive to a negative the nervous student was awake all night didn't sleep same idea so we change the language keep the idea change the language keep the idea nervous student that's a pretty important idea that's a keyword we don't change that we could change all night it's not that important right was awake all night was awake from 10 p.m. until 700 a.m. same idea so that's that's something we could change also we could change it with a synonym by the way synonyms can be one word exchange another word or one word exchange with a phrase several words right all night we could change to yeah like a phrase like from 10 p.m. until 7 a.m. you know you can change it with a phrase doesn't have to be word for word okay so second paraphrasing technique change the verb structure from negative netive to positive or positive to negative okay number three guys excuse me this is a little trickier a little more advanced but it's very powerful change the voice right I think we've learned about voice not verb tense but passive to active right active to passive passive to active so that's not verb tense it's what we call Voice or uh aspect and it does change the sentence grammar a lot but it keeps the meaning it does change emphasis a little bit but for creating a variety of sentences it's very useful so let's see an example so here's our original the letter was sent by the university on August 3rd the letter was sent by the university so this is a passive so we're going to do that we're going to change it from passive to active so when we say the letter was sent the letter didn't send anything the university is the sender right University is like a group of people it's an organization a letter can't move on its own so this is a passive sentence the true subject is the university the university did the action the letter received the action so this is passive let's change it to active the university sent the letter on August 3rd the university sent the letter that's an active sentence right the verb is one word in past tense with passive we have the B verb and the past participle was sent by the subject so that changes the grammar of a sentence but it keeps the main idea we know that a letter went from University to somewhere on August 3rd now August 3rd is one of those numbers it's like data it's a date we don't want to paraphrase a date it's too specific it's too important right the letter well that's a keyword we could say male it probably wouldn't change the meaning too much by the university the university is pretty important because they're the ones that sent it so I wouldn't change that with a synonym okay so this is another good paraphrasing technique change passive to active or active to passive depending on which one you start with and if you're writing a paragraph or an essay mix it up change some originals from passive to active change some original actives to passives creates a good variety number four this one's very useful and this tests and uses your knowledge change the parts of speech change nouns into verbs change verbs into nouns nouns into adjectives so you're using the same word but in a different form okay this is a little trickier right but as you learn more English you'll be able to do this more easily right uh I think we had an example earlier um yeah we had the word to know the verb no that's the verb but we have the the noun form of it knowledge right uh we even have adjective forms like knowing the participle adjective knowing so we can change it uh into different word forms or parts of speech here's another example the teacher helped the student finish her class registration okay class registration registration is a noun it ends with t o n Shan that's a very common ending for nouns in English registration so we're going to change one word registration we're going to change it into a different part of speech right now it's a noun okay oops registration form registration form form so to enter a class you need to fill out a registration form and that's a noun okay let's change it into a verb the teacher help the student register for classes okay the idea is kept we keep the idea the student helps the the teacher helps the student to do what to finish her class registration form well the second sentence the teacher helped the student register well how do we register by filling out the form so the same idea is expressed but the language is quite different and we've just changed one word into a different form right very powerful now this example we've only done it with one word right we could do it with other words for example the verb help helped help can also be a noun we could say the teacher gave the student help right so there's a lot you can do with this particular technique number four very powerful but you know you need a little bit of English knowledge for this so you know work towards this as you learn more forms of words but it requires a bit of advanced vocabulary knowledge so keep learning vocabulary when you learn a word learn its other parts of speech registration register okay that's number four let's go to number five combined sentences right if you see two sentences you could make it into one sentence you can paraphrase by making it into one sentence you could take one long sentence from a source a book and split it into two right changes the language and you can use connecting words like however and therefore or and or but or because to combine the shorter phrases and sentences so here's our original paraphrasing we have two sentences now paraphrasing is a skill students need to learn period it is an important part of academic writing so we're going to connect these two sentences and make it into one paraphrasing comma which is a skill students need to learn comma is an important part of academic writing instead of having two separate sentences now we have one long one and we didn't use any other techniques right but we could we could change that long sentence even more with synonyms parts of speech right there's a lot we can do to change the language so it doesn't say that here but we can do it in both directions we can combine two sentences or three but we could also take one big sentence and break it up into two or three small parts we can do it in both directions okay here's the last one this is a little bit more advanced and tricky but it can be done PR I would suggest practicing with shorter sentences but you can move parts of a sentence to change the sentence structure for example you could start a sentence with the word yesterday yesterday I made pizza well yesterday can move we can say I made pizza yesterday that's a paraphrase that's technique number six uh you can move adverbs right for example the word often we can say I often make pizza often I make pizza we can say I often make or I make pizza often right if you can move a word move it it changes the sentence it changes the language but keeps the main idea okay here's an example and remember guys we're not going to use one of these techniques alone it's not enough to paraphrase a lot of writing want to use a combination of the six techniques here's the original yesterday I stayed in the library until midnight and finish my homework by now you guys have learned a lot of grammar I know because we've talked about a lot of different grammar structures and for example we've talked about how to use the Fanboys right for and nor but or yet so to connect two sentences well especially with words like and we can connect them but we can also move the two sentences uh so if you can that's a way to paraphrase I finished my homework at midnight in the library yesterday right so here they've moved the word yesterday to the end of the sentence simple technique but a changes the language and if you combine other techniques like synonyms uh this could be very useful I think we have a synonym here uh I finished my homework at midnight yeah so the original says I stayed in the library until midnight well if you finished at midnight that means you stayed until midnight same idea so they've actually eliminated words deleted words and kept the same idea if you can do that great any questions about this so far guys that's our six techniques six paraphrasing techniques um when you use them combine them and mix them use them together you can change a lot takes practice of course uh but this is how you change the language but keep the main idea change the language keep the main idea which as we said earlier it's one of your key responsibilities where are we right you have to change a language substantially or a lot and you must preserve or keep the key terms and data as well as the basic idea keep the basic idea right number three we can ignore for now so let's review we had synonyms change the verb to negative from positive to negative or negative to positive number three was change the voice from active to passive or passive to active you can change the parts of speech you can change nouns into verbs verbs into nouns nouns into adjectives if if it's possible not not every word changes like that but some can change register ation form the noun becomes the verb fifth technique was combine sentences make two sentences into one make one sentence into two right here we combine two into one kept the same idea just use different structure so paraphrasing is an academic skill that you use in college a lot and definitely in business life and this this is where you use grammar this is why we need to learn different grammar structures this is why we need to learn passive and active negative and positive verb structure this is why we need this stuff so that we can paraphrase so that we can change language so that we can say the same thing different ways right so paraphrasing is great practice for you guys to really uh solidify reinforce your grammar skills because you have to use your grammar knowledge to paraphrase

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Keywords: essay writing, english essays, writing, writing coach, writing tutor, english tutor, academic writing, research papers, ESL, improve your writing, how to improve my english writing, writing skills, how to write an english essay, how to write essays, paraphrasing, paraphrasing writtenenglish, paraphrasing in english academic writing, how to write a perfect paraphrase, what is a paraphrase?, how to do paraphrasing in english, using synonyms

Id: tQsuke02x84

Length: 34min 14sec (2054 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 23 2024