Paraphrasing involves restating text in one's own words to demonstrate understanding rather than mere repetition. Key techniques for effective paraphrasing include using synonyms, changing word forms, altering grammatical structures, and rearranging word order. Summarizing, on the other hand, condenses information to highlight the main ideas and essential details, often ignoring less important content.

1. Paraphrasing and
Summarizing

2. What is Paraphrasing?
• Paraphrasing is restating a text
by giving the meaning in another
form.
– You paraphrase by rewriting the text in
your own words.
• Paraphrasing shows that you’ve read
and understood the original text
rather than repeating it word for
word.

3. • Step-by-step paraphrasing
1. Decide what the key information is, for the purposes of your
discussion.
2. Change the order of the ideas and the words. This can help you to
emphasize your interpretation of the original text.
3. Change the word form/grammatical form if necessary.
4. Use synonyms if appropriate, but do not change any specific
terminology. The best place to find suitable synonyms will be
elsewhere in the same article.
5. If some words stay the same in the same order (three or more
consecutive words), you need to use quotation marks around these
words.

4. Top Five Paraphrasing
Techniques
1- Use Synonyms
The most common technique, and maybe most important, is to find
synonyms for keywords in the question. For this technique, take note
of the important nouns and verbs in the question, and see in which
synonyms might be appropriate to replace them.
Example: The diagram below shows the process by which bricks are
manufactured for the building industry.
Paraphrased Example: The diagram illustrates the way bricks are
made for the building industry.

5. Top Five Paraphrasing
Techniques
2- Use a Different Word Form
Another way to paraphrase is to change the form of the words used in
the question. It’s helpful to be aware of how word families work in
English in order to do so. A common way to do this is to change the
nouns to verbs, verbs to nouns, adjectives to nouns, etc.
Example: The line graph below shows the consumption of four kinds
of meat in a European country from 1979 to 2004.
Paraphrased Example: The line graph below shows how one European
country consumed four kinds of meat from 1979 to 2004.

6. Top Five Paraphrasing
Techniques
3- Change from the Active to the Passive
Often, we can simply change the grammar structures in the
question. Changing active voice to passive is a great way to
help paraphrase a question.
Example: The real estate developers invested over $40 million
USD into the development of a new senior living community.
Paraphrased Example: $40 million USD was invested in the
development of a new senior living community.

7. Top Five Paraphrasing
Techniques
4- Change the word order
For all this talk about synonyms, changing the word form, or
changing grammatical structures, sometimes it’s easy
enough to simply change where the words stand in a
sentence.
Example: The line graph below shows the consumption of four
kinds of meat in a European country from 1979 to 2004.
Paraphrased Example: The line graph below shows how four
different kinds of meat were consumed over a 25-year
period in one European Country.

8. Top Five Paraphrasing
Techniques
5- Use a combination of techniques
Typically relying on one technique to paraphrase in
your writing is doable, but it can be stressful and
not very effective. To get the best results, try
using at least two or three different techniques.
Using synonyms combined with changing the
grammar or word order can have a dramatic
effect on your paraphrasing skills.

9. An example of
Paraphrasing
Original Paragraph: Usually, female kangaroos give birth to one joey
at a time. Newborns weigh as little as 0.03 ounces at birth. After
birth, the joey crawls into its mother’s pouch, where it will nurse and
continue to grow and develop. Red kangaroo joeys do not leave the
pouch for good until they are more than eight months old.
Paraphrase: After a female kangaroo gives birth to a joey, the
newborn crawls into its mother’s pouch where it feeds and grows until
it’s eight months old.

10. What is Summarizing?
• What is worth remembering?
• When you summarize, you reduce
the amount of text.
- When you reduce text, you take away words.
• Only use the most important ideas from the
text.
– Focus on the key points
• It’s okay to ignore information that isn’t
important.
•

11. Tiger sharks are named for the dark, vertical stripes found mainly on
juveniles. As these sharks mature, the lines begin to fade and almost
disappear. These large, blunt-nosed predators have a duly earned reputation as
man-eaters. They are second only to great whites in attacking people. But
because they have a near completely undiscerning palate, they are not likely to
swim away after biting a human, as great whites frequently do.
They are consummate scavengers, with excellent senses of sight and
smell and a nearly limitless menu of diet items. They have sharp, highly
serrated teeth and powerful jaws that allow them to crack the shells of sea
turtles and clams. The stomach contents of captured tiger sharks have
included stingrays, sea snakes, seals, birds, squids, and even license plates and
old tires.
Retrieved from http://animals.nationalgeographic.com/animals/fish/tiger-shark/.
An example of Summarizing:
Original Text

12. An example of Summarizing:
Summary of text
Tiger sharks will eat just about anything. They use
their sense of sight and smell to hunt. Their pointed,
serrated teeth and strong jaws are helpful when
breaking shells and even human bones. Unlike the
great white shark, the tiger shark is more
aggressive after taking a bite. The tiger shark
probably won’t swim away contently, but will continue
to attack.

13. Helpful Hints
• Read the entire
text first.
• What is the main
idea?
• What are the
important details
that support the
main idea (evidence)?
• Summarize the
text verbally first.
• Take notes, but
don’t write down
the text word for
word.
• Use your own
words. You are the
author.
• Use a thesaurus.

14. Your Turn!
Paraphrase
Service Dogs assist people with
disabilities other than vision or
hearing impairment. With special
training these dogs work with
people who use power or manual
wheelchairs, have balance issues,
have various types of autism, need
seizure alert or response, need to
be alerted to other medical issues
like low blood sugar, or have
psychiatric disabilities.
Retrieved from http://www.assistancedogsinternational.org
Summarize
Service Dogs assist people with
disabilities other than vision or hearing
impairment. With special training these
dogs work with people who use
wheelchairs, have various types of
autism, need seizure alert or response,
or need to be alerted to other medical
issues like low blood sugar. These
specially trained dogs can help by
retrieving objects that are out of their
person’s reach, opening and closing
doors, turning light switches off and on,
barking to indicate that help is needed,
finding another person and leading the
person to the handler, and many other
individual tasks as needed by a person
with a disability.

15. More exercises: Paraphrase
and summarize this text.
• John could not find the butter in his
fridge. He went to buy some from
the store. On coming back, he saw his
cat sitting on the floor, smacking its
lips. There was some yellow stuff
smeared all around its face. Thus,
John solved the mystery of the
missing butter."