What is paraphrasing all about?

Paraphrasing is all about understanding something and interpreting it in your own way. Paraphrasing plays an active role in academic writing as students have to study a subject and then write an essay or paper based on their interpretation.

Why paraphrasing correctly matters so much?

At first glance, paraphrasing might sound like just rephrasing a content by altering a few words and phrases. But paraphrasing is more than just replacing words and phrases.

Rephrasing requires students and content writers to read the book or writing first thoroughly to understand the meaning behind it. And then they are required to restate the content in their own words.

Rewriting a document takes lots of thinking such as which tone to use, which words should be used, and so on.  Besides manual paraphrasing, there’s another option by which students and copywriters can paraphrase content easily.

Paraphrasing is a big deal both for students and content creators. If rewriting is done right, the content will be considered original and interesting. But with incorrectly done paraphrasing, your content will look like a bad copy of some of the original work, discrediting your efforts.

Rules of Paraphrasing Correctly

When you are paraphrasing any text content there are a few things you need to take into consideration.

Read and understand the original text

Although it might seem a very natural thing to do, many students and bloggers don’t really read and understand what the original text says before paraphrasing the content. As a result, the paraphrased text comes out as choppy, toneless, and awkward.

To paraphrase something fluently, first, you need to read the original text thoroughly several times to properly understand the main idea of it.

Use synonyms and phrases appropriately

Almost every word has one or multiple synonyms. And while you might think that replacing a word with any of its synonyms will be enough, that’s not the case.

Don’t rely on thesaurus only when you are paraphrasing. Instead, think about which word will go appropriately with the tone of your text and which word will be the most powerful.

Using Synonyms Effectively in Writing to Attract an Audience

Change in sentence patterns

Most of the time, only replacing words while rewriting comes across as uncreative and lazy. To make your paraphrased content sound more genuine and lively, you should bring changes in the sentence patterns by reversing the order of the words.

Changing sentence patterns works wonderfully in making the output look nicer and even changing the tone of the content.

For example, you can change the voice of your sentence from passive to active and vice versa.

Example:

• (Passive voice) Today’s chemistry class was cut short by Mr. Salvatore.

• (Active voice) Mr. Salvatore left today’s chemistry class early.

Usage of quotations

Students often get confused about what to do with quotations when it comes to paraphrasing.

Quotations are the usage of direct words spoken or written by the original author. While rewriting content, you can either leave the quotes alone by keeping the quoted part inside quotation marks. Or you can restate the quote in your own words.

Get AI assistance

While manually paraphrasing gives the best output, it also takes lots of effort and time to do so.

Fortunately, there’s an AI-based paraphrasing option that rewrites as well as a human writer or in some cases, even better.

The best part of writing with an online free paraphrase app is that you can produce content within a very short time. And even if you don’t want to rely on a paraphraser completely, at least, the tool will help you to get a paraphrased text that you can edit later.