paper(800 words)

Avoiding Plagiarism

Writing a good summary of our source requires quite a bit of thinking and work. Now that we have identified and connected the articles’ main ideas, we will focus on two of the most important skills you will learn in this course—proper paraphrasing and quoting. Let’s start with paraphrase and quoting. When you summarize a source, you take the information from it and either a) put it in your own words, or b) quote the words in the original source. What that means is that every sentence in your summaries will either be a paraphrase or a quote, so it is imperative that you learn how to accurately and correctly paraphrase and quote. Paraphrasing Paraphrasing is the more difficult of the two skills to learn, and it is the one you will use most often because you should quote very sparingly—we’ll come back to that in a minute. Paraphrasing is restating an entire sentence, paragraph, etc. in a writer's own words. It is approximately the same length or even longer than the original. In other words, when you paraphrase a passage, you put it in our own words AND in your own sentence structures. It is simply not good enough to substitute a few synonyms (words that have similar meanings) as most of us probably did on high school research papers; you must substantially change the diction and sentence structure of the original passage, but at the same time retain the meaning and tone found in the original passage. If you fail to make these changes, then you are using other people’s words and claiming them as your own, which is called plagiarizing. There are four basic steps to writing good paraphrases:

1. Make sure that you understand the passage. Obviously, if you do not fully understand what the author is trying to say, you will not be able to accurately represent his or her ideas. Remember, you want to pay attention not only to what the author says but also the tone he or she uses because you will need to accurately represent it as well.

2. Substitute your own words for those of the passage. Use synonyms where necessary. The trick here is to identify the key words used in the passage; these will usually be the nouns and verbs in the passage. Once you have identified these key words, you will replace them with synonyms. Having a good thesaurus can really help you with this process. If I were you, I would consider either searching the internet for a good free one that you can put in your favorites links or purchasing one. Yes, I know your word processor has one, but it is VERY limited. As you chose synonyms be sure that the word you are substituting has exactly the same meaning as the original word. Words that mean close to the same thing sometimes have very different connotations (or shades of meaning), so you need to make sure they match. People invariably ask me if they have to substitute the “minor” words in the sentence—prepositions, articles, etc. Most of the time, you do not have to worry about this because you are also going to change the word order.

3. Rearrange your own sentences so that they read smoothly. Now that you have substituted the

key words, you must change the syntax (or structure) of the sentence. The simplest strategy is to flip-flop the sentence—put the information at the beginning of the original at the end of your paraphrase. This step is also much easier if you know something about sentence structure and

the various types of sentences you can construct. In fact, that is why we did the exercise last week about how to join sentences together using coordinate conjunctions, conjunctive adverbs, semi-colons, and subordination. Review those various types of sentences before embarking on the paraphrasing.

4. Reorder and restructure your sentences to improve coherence and style. The final stage

involves joining and rearranging the sentences you have paraphrased. Once you have paraphrased several sentences, you can add to the “originality” of your summarized passage by re-ordering or combining the ideas found in the source passage. Just remember, you must still accurately represent the ideas found in the original.