Paraphrasing

Paraphrasing is putting information from an author into your own words. Students often get confused about citing and paraphrasing. It's actually quite easy to commit paraphrasing plagiarism in writing or speech. If an author simply borrows ideas from an original source material and doesn't give credit to the original source, a sentence can be considered plagiarized.

As you paraphrase, you may wonder whether you are allowed to use any of the original language form your sources. There are some examples of shared language you don’t need to put in quotation marks. These include:

• Conventional designations (e.g. physician’s assistant, chronic low-back pain)
• Preferred bias-free language (e.g. persons with disabilities)
• Technical terms and phrases within a discipline or genre (e.g. reduplication, cognitive domain, material culture, sexual harassment)

If these terms are used in a passage, they are considered "shared language," meaning there may not be replacement synonyms that can be used. As a result, you can use these terms within your paraphrase without plagiarizing. However, if you use any word-for-word phrases that are not considered "shared language," then you will need to put the material in quotation marks in your own writing.

Material adapted by University of Wisconsin Writing Center