Avoiding Plagiarism through Effective Paraphrasing
Steps to Effective Paraphrasing
1. Read the source article or section of the book carefully.
2. Decide what you are going to include, read it carefully and then close the book and/or turn over the article.
3. Write, in your own words, your understanding of that idea, data or theory.
4. Re-read the source and make sure that:
1. Read the source article or section of the book carefully.
2. Decide what you are going to include, read it carefully and then close the book and/or turn over the article.
3. Write, in your own words, your understanding of that idea, data or theory.
4. Re-read the source and make sure that:
- you have represented their ideas, data, theories accurately;
- you have included the whole idea, theory and/or data; and
- you haven’t copied their sentence structure and/or word usage.
In this learning support intervention, students are encouraged to think of scholarly writing as a dialogue between themselves and the source text's author: the words (through quotations) and ideas (through paraphrases) of the source text inform the new text, which in turn affirms the source text's words and ideas. The figure above shows the parallel between the learning process and transformation of material from the source text (Dawson, 2008).