Many students are having trouble putting articles into their own words. The technical term for translating something into your own words is "paraphrasing". And calling it paraphrasing might help you to understand, because it is the phrases (meaning groups of 2 or more words) in the articles that really seem to be causing this trouble.
To help you understand, I will show you an example of poor paraphrasing, and try to explain where the writer went wrong. Then we will look at some ways the paraphrasing could be improved.
First, below is an article about happiness that you may have already read on the Summary-Response page. We wil use this as the basis for our paraphrasing.
The Chemical Keys to Happiness
Happiness is something we all chase after. But have you ever wondered what makes us feel happy in our brains? Recent studies have shown that two chemicals, dopamine and serotonin, play important roles. Let's take a closer look at how they work to bring joy into our lives.
Dopamine is like our brain's "feel-good" messenger. When we do things we love, like enjoying our favorite meal or receiving praise for our accomplishments, our brain releases dopamine. It gives us a sense of pleasure and encourages us to keep doing those things. For instance, think about the satisfaction you feel after completing a tough task or achieving a long-term goal. That's dopamine rewarding us and motivating us to keep moving forward.
Similarly, serotonin is another key player in our happiness. It helps regulate our mood, appetite, and sleep. When our serotonin levels are in balance, we feel calm and content. Spending quality time with loved ones or engaging in relaxing activities like meditation or yoga can boost serotonin levels, making us feel happier and more fulfilled.
Understanding how dopamine and serotonin work in our brains gives us valuable insights into how we can cultivate more happiness in our daily lives.
Below is a summary of the happiness article above. While the summary has done well to get the main ideas of the article, it has some problems with paraphrasing. These are underlined.
Recent studies have said that dopamine and serotonin play crucial roles in our happiness. Dopamine is our brain's "feel-good" signal. If we do things we enjoy, our brain lets out dopamine, giving us a sense of pleasure and encouraging us to do them again. In the same way, serotonin is also a key player in our happiness. It helps control our mood, appetite, and sleep. If our serotonin levels are balanced, we feel content and calm. Spending quality time with loved ones can boost serotonin, making us feel happier.
All of the underlined parts are basically the original words from the article. They may have had one word changed for a synonym, some words deleted, or the order of words changed, but they are still too similar to the original text. To make this poor example, I copied and pasted the original article and went through it changing and deleting. You should not do this!
So how can we fix one of these problems? Let's take a look.
"Recent studies have said that dopamine and serotonin play crucial roles in our happiness."
Let's first look at what it's OK to keep: the keywords "happiness", "serotonin", and "dopamine". Happiness is the keyword of the whole article, so can't be changed, and serotonin and dopamine are chemical terms with no synonyms, so we can't change those.
In terms of ideas, we need to say that the chemicals are important in happiness and recent studies have said this. So let's change "recent studies" to "current research" which is basically synonymous, and we have already found a synonym for "important" in "crucial", but it would be wrong to just plug these into the sentence because the function words (such as "have" and "that") will also be too similar.
Instead, we could try changing the form of the keyword, happiness, from noun to adjective, forcing us to use some different grammar: "" And for the research idea, we can use a adverbial clause rather than a subordinator (don't worry about these grammar terms). "According to current research, dopamine and serotonin are crucial for making us happy." If you look back at sentence 3 of the original article, you will see that our new sentence has basically the same idea, but only reuses the words "dopamine" and "serotonin".
There are some other tips that may help you to paraphrase:
Use a general term instead of more specific terms, especially in a list: "Apples, bananas, and kiwis" can easily become "fruit".
Do the opposite, and use a specific example instead of a general term : "try extreme sports" could become "have a go at bungee jumping, for example".
Use the passive voice to omit keywords and/or change the order of a sentence. "The brain releases dopamine" can be changed to "Dopamine is released" or "Dopamine is released by the brain".
If you follow a similar process to this one, and consider the tips, you should paraphrase much better. But I still recommend that you don't look at the original sentence at all when you paraphrase. That way, you will just write the ideas in your own way.