Paraphrasing in English
Final paraphrasing exercise
1 Remember the process
First identify the elements to be paraphrased. (You might like to write a list.)
Next, change the individual items, using the techniques you studied above.
After that, write your paraphrase. (It might be longer than the original text. That's OK.)
Finally, do not forget to proof-read your paraphrase.
“If it wasn’t for the hogs, there’d be nothing here. This would be a ghost town.” An elderly man first said these words to me in a coffee shop in the town that I call Dixon, the central hub of some fifteen thousand residents in a recently formed one hundred-mile-radius region that cuts across the Great Plains and Midwest of the United States.
From: Alex Blanchette: Porkopolis, 2020.
2 Compare your list of items to be paraphrased with this solution.
- Is your paraphrase academic enough?
- Is it different enough?
- Have you changed the structure?
- Are the words you have found really synonyms?
- Do they have undesired connotations?
- Are they too specific?
- Do they sound all right to you?
- Is any information redundant?
- Is any information irrelevant?