Paraphrase (v.) the act of putting source material into your own words while including the same facts and ideas mentioned in the original source.

Here are some of the Do’s and Don’ts of effective making and paraphrase:

DO:

• Include the most important ideas from your source passage
• Rephrase in a way that emphasizes the information most important to your thesis
• Express the ideas in your own writerly voice, using not only your own language but your own phrasing
• Create a rewrite that is close to the same length as the source passage

DON’T:

• Keep the same sentence structure as the original passage. You want to do more than fill in synonyms for individual words – you want to fully rephrase the source material
• Use too much of the wording of the original source – you want to use vocabulary that you fully understand and are comfortable with
• Feel stuck with the order of information your source uses. Often, changing the order of the information can help you emphasize the ideas that are most important to your paper!

To avoid the risk of plagiarism, you should always work to create transformative paraphrase, which fully changes the way the ideas are expressed. Transformative paraphrase can be challenging, especially when working with complex source language. Consider this sentence from “Courtship and Dance: A Journey to Self-Understanding in Emma and Pride and Prejudice” by E.M. Ludu:

There were particular customs in courtship, which young ladies and gentlemen had to observe if they were to be accepted as viable participants on the marriage market.

When paraphrasing, I might be tempted to use the thesaurus tool to change individual words, rather than fully rewording the sentence. If I do that, I might end up with a sentence like this:

There were certain practices in wooing, which young women and men had to respect if they were to be included as feasible members of the matrimony market.

This sentence is confusing, and I have also plagiarized the source’s sentence structure. However, if I create a transformative paraphrase, I might come up with something like this:

In Austen’s time, young people were under pressure to observe strict courtship rituals or risk social condemnation.