Paraphrasing

We define paraphrasing as putting a passage from an author into your own words. However, what are your own words? How different must your paraphrase be from the original? The answer is it should be considerably different. The whole point of paraphrasing is to show you have read and understood another person's ideas and can summarize them in your own writing style rather than borrowing their phrases. If you just change a few words or add some bits of your own to an otherwise reproduced passage, you will probably be penalized for plagiarism. You should aim to condense and simplify a writer's ideas and describe them using different sentence structures and expressions.