Avoid replacing a source’s words with synonyms - Paraphrasing sources effectively - Multilingual Writers and ESL Topics

Rules for writers, Tenth edition - Diana Hacker, Nancy Sommers 2021

Avoid replacing a source’s words with synonyms
Paraphrasing sources effectively
Multilingual Writers and ESL Topics

Effective paraphrasing is an important skill for writing in college. However, learning how to paraphrase can be challenging because some of the vocabulary may be new and unfamiliar to multilingual writers.

The purpose of paraphrasing is to restate an author’s ideas in your own words. Most writers find the following process for paraphrasing useful:

1. Read and understand the text.

2. Put the text aside.

3. Express the information in your own words.

4. Compare your paraphrase to the original text to check that you have used different words and different sentence structures but have kept the author’s meaning.

This process provides an effective way to paraphrase. However, it requires that the writer have a large vocabulary and well-developed sentence-writing abilities. Sometimes it’s hard to find the right words to paraphrase a sentence or to know whether a paraphrase has the same meaning as the original source.

The following sections provide rules of thumb that can help you develop skill with paraphrasing. For more on how to paraphrase effectively, see 52c, 55d, and 56a.

32a Avoid replacing a source’s words with synonyms.

Learning to paraphrase will help you communicate the ideas of authors effectively and avoid plagiarism — using another person’s ideas or words without giving credit to that person. However, even if you tell your reader that information comes from another author, you still plagiarize if you change only the words but do not make the presentation of the information your own.

Some writers misinterpret the instructions to “use your own words”; they simply replace words in the source with synonyms, words that have similar meanings. Such word-by-word paraphrases frequently result in awkward sentence structures and inaccuracy. Meaning in English often comes from phrases and sentences rather than from individual words. Also, synonyms have similar meanings, but they rarely have identical meanings. Sometimes a synonym requires a different sentence structure than the original word does.

The following examples illustrate some of the problems that can arise with word-by-word paraphrasing.

Here is a short passage from Rebecca Webber’s article “Make Your Own Luck.”

ORIGINAL SOURCE

People who spot and seize opportunity are different. They are more open to life’s forking paths, so they see possibilities others miss. And if things don’t work out the way they’d hoped, they brush off disappointment and launch themselves headlong toward the next fortunate circumstance. As a result, they’re happier and more likely to achieve their goals.

— Rebecca Webber, “Make Your Own Luck,” p. 64

The following is a word-by-word paraphrase of the highlighted sentences.

INEFFECTIVE PARAPHRASE: MEANING CHANGED

Persons who see and grab chances are diverse. They are further exposed to life’s dividing trails, and they view prospects others ignore.

The first problem with this paraphrase is that the student who wrote it used the same sentence structure as in the original passage. Because she did not use her own sentence structure, this paraphrase is plagiarized. Second, the words that the student substituted are not exact synonyms, so the paraphrase has lost some of the meaning of the original passage.

✵ The word grab is an informal synonym of the word seize and may not be acceptable in an academic paper.

Diverse and different have similar, but not identical, meanings. The word different in the original passage implies that people who are open to opportunities are different from people who are not open to opportunities. Using diverse in this context implies that people who welcome opportunity are different from one another. Using diverse distorts the meaning of the sentence.

✵ Using exposed instead of open changes the meaning in a significant way. Exposed implies that something negative has happened to these people, while open is a positive character trait.

The following paraphrase of the underlined sentence demonstrates another potential problem with word-by-word paraphrases. Using synonyms often requires changing the surrounding sentence structure because the same word can be more than one part of speech. For example, work can be either a noun or a verb; in the following paraphrase, the student has substituted the noun effort for the verb work, which is not an effective substitution.

INEFFECTIVE PARAPHRASE: AWKWARD RESULT

And if everything don’t effort out the manner they’d wanted, they rebuff disappointment and throw themselves impulsive toward the next lucky situation.

✵ When the student changed things to everything, she also needed to change the verb from the plural form (don’t) to the singular form (doesn’t).

✵ Using effort in place of work is not effective. Effort is a synonym for the noun work but not a synonym for the verb work. The part of speech of a word is an important consideration when choosing a synonym.

✵ When the student substituted manner for way, she should have used a different structure: in the manner.

✵ Although headlong has a similar meaning to impulsive, in the original passage headlong is an adverb modifying the verb launch; impulsive is an adjective. An adjective cannot replace an adverb in a sentence.