Hello, let me introduce myself. My name is Tom and I am studying here at the JLU. I would like to welcome you warmly to this training module 'Paraphrasing in English'. In this module I am going to tell you a story. It's the story of how I learned to paraphrase in English. When I started studying here at this university, I did not really know how it could be possible that we can use other people's ideas to write our own paper. I thought that's not fair. Someone else did all the work, I just take it, put it in my essay, synthesize the ideas and, hey presto, my paper is finished. So my inital idea of paraphrasing was something like cribbing at school, which, when I was at school, was of course far from my mind. However, then I learned that cooperation is the basis of academic work. We can hardly study as if we were the first person in the world trying to answer a certain question. That means paraphrasing (or summarizing or quoting) and referring the author we cooperate with this way is the only fair and honest way to build our ideas on someone else's work. It's like discovering an unknown country using the maps some of our predecessors charted to move further that this explorer could travel. So I would like to show you how I learned to paraphrase and the techniques I have been practising ever since. My approach is to begin at the word level and then go on to the phrase and the sentence level. I will also provide you with seven exercises for each step so that you can practise your newly learnt rules and reflect on them. I have symbolized the different parts as follows:

When you see me, you will get an explanation or comment.

When you see this notebook, you will get an example of a paraphrase or paraphrasing technique.

When you see this symbol, you can do an exercise with feedback.

In general, my story is organised in such a way as to accommodate two approaches to it: you can listen to the story from the beginning to the end in about 2-3 hours or just dip in at different points that are of interest to you. As it is a story, there is no final test. You can listen to it and use the tips in your papers. It is all about learning and reflecting. Have fun.