A Step-By-Step Guide For Students To Paraphrase An Academic Writing

Paraphrasing involves restating another person’s text or information by using your own words without damaging its original meaning. It is done both manually and with the help of an online paraphrasing tool.

Paraphrasing is one of the most widely used writing techniques in academic writing, all thanks to the benefits it provides like enhanced readability, clarity, and elimination of plagiarism.

However, keep this in mind, students will get these benefits when they effectively paraphrase the academic writing. Obviously, they have to follow the right steps for this.

In this blog post, I will discuss a step-by-step guide that will teach students how to paraphrase academic writing efficiently. So, without discussing any additional thing, let’s head towards the guide.

1.      Read the text carefully

First of all, you have to read the academic text (that you are planning to paraphrase) carefully. Doing this will almost eliminate the chances of paraphrasing the writing in an inaccurate manner (a version that does not deliver the same meaning as the original text).

Additionally, students can consider reading the source writing multiple times to get a good understanding.

However, they should not just focus on reading the information, instead, they also have to judge its meaning from different perspectives to get a variety of ideas. When they have a variety of ideas, they can paraphrase the text in a completely new way – which is one of the main goals

2.      Spot complex words, sentences or paragraphs

One of the main purposes of rephrasing the academic writing is to simplify complex sentences or paragraphs. So, after understanding the text efficiently, students need to identify complex sentences or paragraphs in their writing.

Doing this will allow them to determine what points they need to improve during paraphrasing.

In order to identify difficult sentences or paragraphs, students can consider re-reading the information.

Once the identification is complete, it will be good if you note them down on a separate page.

This is because, during the paraphrasing process, you may forget to paraphrase a key sentence or paragraph. Doing this can greatly affect the overall quality of paraphrased text.

1.      Start paraphrasing by replacing words and altering sentence structure

After understanding the source text and identifying its main points, you can start paraphrasing it by replacing words and altering sentence structure.

The replacement of words refers to changing words or phrases in the original text with their relevant and simple synonyms.

On the other hand, altering sentence structure refers to the rearrangement of words. Taking care of both these efficiently will definitely require good writing skills.

If you (the student) have excellent writing abilities, you will not face any hassle. But what about the students who aren’t good at writing? Don’t worry, there is a solution available.

They can take help from a word paraphraser that can quickly paraphrase the given text by both replacing and rearranging its words.

Let me explain this with a live example. Below, there is a piece of text that I’m going to paraphrase with an online paraphrasing tool.

Input text: “The lady hurried to the flight gate at the airport with her six kids in tow. The kids had other priorities than getting to the gate, so this wasn’t a simple assignment.”

The tool will first efficiently understand this text, identify complex words or sentences in it, and then start paraphrasing. After paraphrasing, the output it provided is in the picture below:

Output text: “The woman rushed to the airport gate with her six children. This was not an easy task as the children had other priorities besides getting to the gate.”

Now, if I compare both input and output text, you can see in the output, the tool has replaced the words of input text like “lady” with “women” and “hurried” with “rushed”.

In the second sentence of the output, the tool has altered the sentence structure by bringing the last part of the second sentence to the start and the first part to the end.

 Moreover, the tool also replaced the words of that part from “This wasn’t a simple assignment” to “This was not an easy task”. Additionally, in the second sentence of the output the tool has changed the word “kids” to “children”.

So, this is how students can automatically paraphrase their academic writing with the help of an online paraphraser. See the best screenwriting school in the US.

4.      Proofread

This is the final step, in which students have to proofread or review the paraphrased text. While proofreading, they have to take care of multiple things:

• Accuracy: They have to make sure the original meaning of the paraphrased text remains the same. Along with this, students also have to ensure the tone and style are the same as the original text.  
• Connection between sentences: Students have to ensure that they have not missed any sentence and all the sentences are connected with each other.
• Grammar errors: Ensure the paraphrased text is free from all kinds of grammar and spelling errors.

Proofreading is essential for students, as it can prevent them from feeling embarrassed in front of the professor or instructor.   

Final Words

Paraphrasing is a writing technique through which students can enhance the quality of their academic material in terms of readability, uniqueness, and clarity. However, paraphrasing needs to be done by following the right steps.

In this article, I have explained those steps in detail, and I hope you will find them valuable. Happy Academic Writing!

Last Updated on October 16, 2023 by Admin