Do you know how to summarize your writing and paraphrase your
content? In academic writing, summarizing and paraphrasing are very
essential skills. With majority of college writing essays geared towards
proving a point, you will very likely need to depend on a lot of source
material to effectively argue your case.
First, a bit of refresher:
- Summarizing is all about reducing a material down to its most
important points, often bringing it down to roughly a third or less of
the original source.
- Paraphrasing, on the other hand, is about restating a passage in
your own words, often as an alternative to using a direct quotation.
In
the case of your college essays, you will employ both techniques to
integrate evidence from previous writing into your own work. If you're
struggling to put together either type, the following advice might help.
Summarizing
- Scan the text.
- Locate and highlight the main points. A good first place to look for are the topic sentences on each paragraph.
- Rewrite the material using the main points you found, setting aside evidence and examples.
Paraphrasing
- Review the source text.
- Rewrite it in your own words.
- Use reporting verbs and phrases to show attribution.
- Put unique and author-driven phrases in quotes.
Like
other parts of your essays, summaries and paraphrases are best done
with the help of a competent writing software. While the thoughts you
will express in them aren't original, the words you will be using are
and they'll be best served with a dose of polish from such a tool.
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