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In hip hop, artists commonly “sample” other songs. They copy part of an existing song, like a beat or chorus, and they paste it into a new song of their own creation—and they rarely cite their sources!
The academic world is in some ways like the world of hip hop. When we write something, we are usually building on other people’s scholarship. We respond to others’ ideas, repeating the ones we agree with, challenging the ones we disagree with, and adding our own new arguments. However, in the academic world, we must be careful about giving credit to our sources.
If we lift entire sentences from another text and paste them into our own essay, we need to put quotes around them so readers know that they are quotations. If we don’t do this, it’s considered plagiarism.
According to Columbia College’s article What is Plagiarism?, plagiarism is “a form of intellectual theft and fraud. It involves using someone else's words or ideas and passing them off as your own by not providing credit, either deliberately or accidentally”.
(That was an example of a quotation!)
Putting a couple quotes from an author in your paper is a great way to illustrate your points and provide evidence for your thesis. However, if you rely too heavily on quotes, you miss the chance to provide your own interpretation of the text, and show your reader that you have understood the author’s points. That’s why you need to paraphrase. When you paraphrase, you restate the author’s ideas in your own words.
Paraphrasing may seem impossibly difficult at first. However, once you learn the five major ways to paraphrase and practice them, it’s not too hard. They are:
Using synonyms
Moving phrases
Changing parts of speech
Sentence combining, and
Changing sentence structure
Watch the PowerPoint below to see what these strategies look like, and practice using them yourself.
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