Paraphrasing and Summarizing Essay

Paraphrasing is restating someone else’s ideas in your own words while providing proper in-text citations and references to acknowledge the original source, and let the readers know that the idea is not yours. It plays an important role in academic documents, legal documents, articles journals, etc. It requires crucial thinking, understanding and writing skills to rephrase a document in your own words.| paraphrasing reflects the understanding of a person rather than the writer who has presented the original work. Moreoever, a good quality paraphrased version of a work can be more concise and yet thorough than the original piece of writing. A summary is a concise version of a long detailed text while keeping the context clear. A summary can also be called an abstract, synopsis, executive summary or recap of the original. It highlights the main points of the original text, but it is smaller than the main article. Without summaries, a reader would have to read the entire text that definitely needs a lot of time. Instructions Summarizing 1. Read the original text straight through, quickly but thoroughly. 2. Reread the original material, highlight ideas that stand out to you as being important, and underline key terms. 3. Break the text into sections, with each conveying one of the author’s main points. The goal of a summary is to express the central ideas of the original work, leaving out secondary material. 4. Write your summary in sentence form, using the main points and key terms as the muscle of your summary. Try to keep the ideas in your summary organized in the same sequence as in the original text. 5. Compare the original text to your summary to ensure you have covered the main ideas and haven’t left out any key terms. Paraphrasing 1. Read the original text straight through, quickly but thoroughly. 2. Reread the original material, taking note of the concept the author is trying to convey. 3. Express the text in your own words without changing the author’s meaning. The goal of a paraphrase is to rewrite the original text without leaving out anything of substance. 4. Compare the original text to your paraphrase to ensure you have captured the essence of the author’s ideas and have not quoted the text directly. The paraphrase must be written with language and sentence structure entirely your own.