Paraphrasing is when you put someone else's information in your assignment, but you reword it in your own style. You haven't copied and pasted someone's exact words but you are saying pretty much the same thing they are - you've just rearranged and changed the words in the sentence to make it sound like you.
Why would I use paraphrase in my assignment?
Paraphrasing can be really useful because it allows you to use someone else's work as evidence for your own ideas. Especially to prove that you did some research and didn't just make things up!
For example, in science you might be writing about the Orangutang. You found this information on the National Geographic website:
"Orangutans have an enormous arm span. A male may stretch his arms some 7 feet from fingertip to fingertip—a reach considerably longer than his standing height of about 5 feet"
A paraphrase might be as simple as:
When an Orangutan stretches its arms out, the distance they can reach from hand to hand is longer than they are tall!
How do I paraphrase in my assignment without plagarising?
When you have paraphrased something you need to remember to put that website or book in your bibliography.
Once you hit year 9, you are also encouraged to indicate where the information came from. The easiest way of doing this is to put the author's surname and date of publication in brackets after the paraphrase:
Alice jumped up to follow the rabbit. She had never seen one with a waistcoat and pocket watch before. (Carroll, 1609)
That way your teacher can flick to your bibliography and find the rest of the information pointing to where you found your information.
No comments:
Post a Comment