How to Paraphrase like a Straight-A Student | 5 Simple Steps

Paraphrasing is a simple skill of rewriting text to change its wording without changing its meaning. It’s used to re express a piece of text or speech, basically someone else’s words, in your own words.

The practical use of paraphrasing happens when writers, especially students, need to rewrite source texts and avoid plagiarism. They do this for a number of reasons, such as to:

• Avoid similarities in plagiarism detection tools (simplified as plagiarism)

• Re-express the borrowed ideas more clearly or freely

• Demonstrate an understanding of the borrowed source text

• Avoid too many direct quotes in their assignment, where paraphrasing serves as an alternative

However, many students are not able to paraphrase text properly. Their paraphrase either ends up almost identical to the source text or with a changed meaning, or worse, both. Both scenarios means the paraphrasing wasn’t thorough or proper enough.

Meanwhile straight-A students paraphrase the text properly and avoid both problems. They follow a process for paraphrasing that helps them protect the text’s meaning, improve its clarity, as well as avoid plagiarism. But what is this process?

This article breaks the process of paraphrasing down into five simple steps. You can learn and master these five steps easily and be able to paraphrase just like straight-A students.

Step 1: Read, Understand, then Look Away

What’s the most effective way to convey someone’s message without erring in its meaning? It’s by listening to the message carefully and understanding it properly. Once you do that, conveying it to others becomes very easy.

Likewise, the best way and the first step to paraphrasing a text properly is to read and understand it for proper comprehension.

The mistake some students make is not understanding the text first. When they don’t comprehend the content’s meaning or message inside out, they end up resaying it pretty much similarly, which leads to similarities between the two.

What straight-A students do is they understand the original passage first. This involves reading it a few times thoroughly and taking necessary notes to jot down information and even engaging in discussions with themselves about its meaning, all of which gives them the clarity they need to resay the text without having to rely on the original wording.

Once understood, they can say the source words using different terms and produce a unique version of it that carries the same meaning.

So, start by reading the sentence or short paragraph until you clearly understand what it’s saying. Ask yourself:

• What is the main point?

• Is the author explaining? Are they narrating? Are they arguing? Or are they defining something?

• What details are essential? And what can be simplified?

If you can explain the idea in your own words clearly, you’re ready to paraphrase it. But if you can’t explain it well, there’s still some room for comprehension.

One more mistake students make is paraphrasing while looking at the original text. Constantly referring back to the original words of the content reinforces them in your mind, making it lean back on them when you start paraphrasing. This can lead to similarities even if you understand the meaning well.

One way to prevent this issue is by looking away after reading and before paraphrasing for a while. This could mean taking a small, 10-15 minutes break before you paraphrase the text by recalling the ideas in your mind and writing them in your own words instead of falling back on the original wording.

Step 2: Identify the Core Idea and Supporting Details

A piece of text can be separated into its core idea and its supporting details. The most important part of the text is always its core ideas, whereas the supporting details are secondary.

A paraphrase usually focuses on the text’s core idea. Supporting details can be included but not all of them deserve to be included. Straight-A students know how to separate these core ideas from supporting details.

Here’s how you can break the text down:

• Core Idea: A core idea is the central message or claim of a text. Identify this idea and make sure it’s included in your paraphrase.

• Supporting Details: Supporting details are extra bits like examples, explanations, statistics, or qualifiers, which can also be identified and separated.

Your goal should be to preserve the core idea when paraphrasing while deciding how much of the supporting details are necessary to be a part of it. You can condense or reorganize information as well without losing meaning for effective paraphrasing, in many cases.

Separating the core idea from supporting details gives you clarity of what’s to be preserved and what’s to be discarded safely and allows you to construct a clearer version of the text without falling back on the original wording neither changing the meaning nor harming the core message.

Step 3: Change the Structure

In paraphrasing, you can change a text’s both word and its structure.

Changing the words results in a simpler and lighter paraphrase. This paraphrase can easily be identical to the original text. Being “identical” here means the structure of the text matches very closely, well, because it was never changed to begin with, considering a student paraphrases the text by only swapping its word. The identical structure leads to detectable similarities in plagiarism detectors, which flag then flag the text as potentially plagiarized.

Similarities in structure occur because modern plagiarism detection tools look for structural similarities in addition to words to detect plagiarism more accurately. So, a similarity can still occur even when the words of the text are different, if the structure is identical.

What straight-A students do to prevent it is that they alter the text’s structure on top of changing its word choice. That results in a much more varied and unique paraphrasing that easily bypasses plagiarism detection without compromising its meaning.

Some effective structural changes include:

• Turning a long sentence into two shorter ones (or vice versa)

• Switching from passive voice to active voice

• Reordering ideas so the emphasis changes

• Turning a definition into an explanation, or an explanation into a concise statement

Suppose an original sentence starts with a cause and ends with an effect. You can flip its structure by starting it with the effect and ending it with the cause. It’s a clever way to preserve the text’s meaning and message without copying its exact structure. The changing of words with their synonyms on top of that minimizes any chances of plagiarism.

Step 4: Use Your Own Academic Voice

A subtle yet notable technique in good paraphrasing is using your own academic voice. “Academic” just means its objective and scholarly, but “voice” refers to your own unique way of writing.

A student’s academic voice is their unique way of phrasing and expressing their opinion. It’s essentially a culmination of their style, beliefs, knowledge, perspectives, and personality.

Straight-A students don’t copy a source text as it is. They develop their own consistent academic voice and rewrite the content so that it fits their own writing style. This means they:

• Avoid awkward synonym swaps that don’t fit the context

• Use terms that they’ve already used elsewhere in their assignment

• Match tone, such as formal or neutral

Using your own writing style to paraphrase is better than trying to replace every single word. You only need to focus on rewriting the idea as you would explain it in an assignment. Sometimes, the best paraphrase uses a language that’s simpler than the original text.

Some students even rely on paraphrasing tools like paraphraser.us to try out different variations of the text and check which one fits their style better. Multiple versions of the text can also be done manually and is a helpful way to explore what fits your style best.

Step 5: Revise and Cite Properly

The last step to paraphrasing effectively includes improving the quality of the paraphrase. A paraphrase isn’t necessarily well-done or finished once it's written for the first time. It may go through a number of revisions and edits to become optimal.

Such is the case with most paraphrases. They need refinement, which includes reading it out loud to spot awkward wording, comparing the altered and the original version of the text to find structural similarities, and doing an integrity check to ensure the original meaning is still intact.

When you compare the paraphrase to the original version, check:

• Is the meaning preserved?

• Does the structure differ clearly from the source?

• Is the meaning clear?

If any of these criteria aren’t satisfied, you don’t have an optimal paraphrase just yet. It might be better to refine it until it’s optimal.

One very important aspect of paraphrasing source texts is citing their sources. Citing the source of a reference (the paraphrase) is always required and mandatory, regardless of whether it comes as unique and original in plagiarism detection tools or not. This is something you can just simply not skip. So, if you borrowed a sentence or two from a source, like a website, book, journal, or another publication, you must cite the source’s details, including the author’s full name, website name, page title, page number, date of publishing, page URL, etc.

Common Paraphrasing Mistakes to Avoid

With every skill comes common mistakes. Straight-A students are aware of common errors in paraphrasing and avoid them for optimal outcomes. Here are some of these common mistakes to avoid when you paraphrase:

• Over-Reliance on Synonyms: Changing words without changing structure is risky.

• Paraphrasing too Much at Once: Work sentence by sentence or idea by idea.

• Keeping Technical Phrases Unchanged: Rewrite them where possible, or use quotation marks.

• Skipping the Citation: Paraphrased ideas still require references.

Avoiding these issues will reduce similarity issues and the number of revisions you’ll need to refine the text.

Conclusion

Straight-A students follow a process for paraphrasing content that allows them to prevent similarities with the original version while preserving its meaning, as explained in the guide. This process can be broken down into five simple steps: (1) Reading and understanding the original text, (2) Identifying the core idea and supporting details, (3) Changing the structure of the text instead of just words, (4) Using your own unique academic voice, and (5) revising and citing the source properly.