Paraphrasing
What is Paraphrasing?
  • Putting someone else's facts and information into your own words.  

  • Because it is not your information, you must include an in-text citation to give credit to the original source.

  • You must rework the entire sentence and put in your own voice.

  • Paraphrasing is not only replacing words with synonyms.

  • Paraphrasing is not only changing the simple word order.  

Original:  Ronald Reagan liked jelly beans and monkey bread.
Bad Paraphrase:  Ronald Reagan enjoyed monkey bread and jelly beans (Olver).
Better Paraphrase:  Jelly beans and monkey bread were a few of Ronald Reagan's favorite foods (Olver).
How to Paraphrase
  1. READ the material completely.

  2. JOT down notes in bullet form.

  3. DO NOT COPY notes word-for-word.

  4. SET NOTES ASIDE and write new sentence.

  5. COMPARE notes and your new sentence to make sure facts are correct.

  6. INCLUDE in-text citation.


In-text Citations - Basic Rules 
In-text Citation Basics
 
  • Period is always at the very end.. 

  • If author is known, ALWAYS use author’s last name....(Goldstein 25).
  • If two authors, list both authors last names. ......(Smith and Pearson).
  • If three or more authors, list first last name and then et al.    ......(White et al.). 

  • If NO author, use first word of article title. …. (“Living"). or ....("A New")

  • If it is from a source with page numbers (book, magazine article, etc), ALWAYS use page number. …(Goldstein 87). 

  • There is NO punctuation or abbreviations (p. pp.) between author/title and page number.   ......(Smith 216).

  • In-text citations must match up with Works Cited page.  If you have not used a source from your Works Cited page within your paper (in-text citations), that source MUST be removed from your Works Cited page.