We define paraphrasing as putting a passage from an author into your own words. However, what are your own words? How different must your paraphrase be from the
? The answer is it should be considerably different. The
point of paraphrasing is to show you have read and understood another person's ideas, and can summarize them in your own writing style rather than
their phrases. If you just change a few words, or add some bits of your own to an
reproduced passage, you will probably be penalized for
. You should aim to condense and
a writer's ideas and describe them
different sentence structures and expressions.