1. What is parahrasing?
Paraphrasing is the act of rewriting a piece of writing in your own words, but retaining the
original meaning. A paraphrase is supposed to be about the same length as the original.
Paraphrasing is considered to be one of the most important techniques in academic writing.
2. Why should we paraphrase?
- to avoid plagiarism
- to show that you fully understand the source and can express it in a different way.
3. What are paraphrasing techniques?
- change part of speech (e.g from verb to noun,.. )
- change from active voice to passive voice
- use synonyms
- change sentence structures
- use introduction phrases
- combine multiple sentences into one or two sentence
4. What are steps to paraphrase?
Step 1 Read the source several times to understand it fully and thoroughly
Step 2 Highlight important words and phrases that might need to be paraphrased. Remember to
keep key terms and proper nouns
Step 3 Paraphrase the text without looking at it
Step 4 Compare the paraphrased text with the original to see if you have left any information in
your version.
5. Tips on paraphrasing
- It’s important to keep the original meaning of the text, not leaving out any information.
- It’s also advisable to combine at least 2 techniques in your paraphrase. Usually we use
synonyms and sentence structure transformation.

- You should not try to paraphrase every word in the original, choose key words that carry
important meanings or words and phrases that you might find them easy to rephrase.