Writing with Ease: Paraphrase and Summary
To view the recorded workshop, please click this link:
http://khe2.adobeconnect.com/wweparaphrase/
Before the presentation, there will be two polls asking participants to a) identify
themselves in relationship to KU (undergraduate, graduate, fac/staff, other) and
b) share how they learned about the workshop (KU Campus, instructor email,
Facebook). During the pre-workshop discussion, we will introduce what
challenges we face when it comes to paraphrasing.
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When writing a research project, it seems like quoting is the easiest way to go.
You put in the direct words, use quotation marks, include the parenthetical
citation, and you’re done. It’s so fast and easy, you might wonder why you can’t
just quote your way through your research. The problem is that quoting sources
without ever paraphrasing or summarizing can lack critical thinking. You have to
think carefully about why a particular piece of information from a source should
be in your paper at all by asking yourself the question, “How are you using the
source’s information to advance your own thesis statement or central
argument?” Oftentimes you will want to emphasize something about a piece of
information in such a way that requires your own words, which means that you
can demonstrate critical thinking by paraphrasing or summarizing. Another point
to consider is the root of the word “authority,” which is another word for power,
is “author,” which is another word for a writer or creator. If you are to be the
author of your paper, you have to be in control of your writing by using your own
voice as much as possible. That means keeping quotations to a minimum. Now,
there are some situations where you would not want to paraphrase and
summarize. These “ideal quoting” scenarios can be boiled down into one simple
question: “Do you need the source’s exact words to critique the source, build
dialogue, or preserve the beauty or accuracy of the source’s phrasing?” I would
never paraphrase a great public speaker like Martin Luther King; instead, I
would want to quote his words so that I could preserve his eloquent use of
language. Of course, I also have to talk in the paper about how King is using
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language eloquently, in as little as a phrase of my own or even an entire
paragraph. If I were going to challenge the exact words of an outspoken public
figure like Fred Phelps, the pastor of the Westboro Baptist Church who leads
controversial protests at soldiers’ funerals, I would want to quote him so that I
could really critique his words and give my responses along with the responses
of other sources, thus creating a back-and-forth dialogue.
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We are all familiar with quoting a source for our research in discussion board
posts and projects. What are paraphrasing and summarizing, though? Well,
quoting is borrowing someone’s ideas by using their exact words in quotation
marks, right? Paraphrasing is then borrowing someone else’s ideas but using
your own words. We have all paraphrased someone else’s words before in
casual conversation. For instance, I’m very close to both my mom and to my
grandma. I live far away from them, so I have to call them individually to talk
with them. First I usually talk to my grandma, then I talk to my mom. Inevitably, I
wind up hearing my grandma say something about what my mom said.
Grandma never quotes Mom directly; instead, she paraphrases Mom. My mom
will say to my grandma, “Molly is planning a trip to the South to present at the
University and might have time to visit with family part of the time.” Those would
be her exact words. Then my grandma will say to me, “Your mother says you
are thinking about visiting us when you come down South.” See how Grandma
didn’t use Mom’s exact words, but she paraphrased the information she wanted
to cover? Notice that she mentioned “Your mother says”? Do you have any
conversations like that with your relatives, where one is paraphrasing
information from the other person to have a discussion with you? Grandma in
this case made sure to credit her source by using the words “Your mother
says,” just like we use a signal phrase to introduce information from an outside
source by saying “According to this source,” and she took the idea that my mom
brought up but used her own words. We’ll look at an academic example of
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paraphrasing in the upcoming slides, but I just wanted to give an idea of how we
already use paraphrasing in our everyday lives. We paraphrase a source by rephrasing the same idea in our own voice highlighting the information we want to
share with our readers. We also summarize in our daily lives.
Summarizing is borrowing the main ideas from a larger piece of text, like a
paragraph or a newspaper article, and using only a sentence or two of your own
words. You are boiling a large piece of text into a smaller piece of text to get the
main points across using your own words. We do this all the time when we talk
about our favorite television shows with friends, right? I’m a huge fan of
Downton Abbey, and that is a show where so many things happen in one
episode that it is hard to keep track. I’ll talk with a friend who has not seen all of
the episodes, and I’ll have to ask which episode was the last she had seen so I
don’t spoil anything for her when she catches up to me. She’ll say, “The last
episode of Downton Abbey I saw was the one where Mr. Carson learns how to
use the telephone and Lady Cybil gets the red-headed housemaid a secretary’s
job.” Now, that isn’t all that happened in the episode, but those are the main
points. Notice that she gave credit to the source by mentioning the show’s
name, and she took the ideas of the episode without using any of the show’s
words– she used her own words in describing things like “the red-headed
housemaid.” So summarizing takes the “best of” or “greatest hits” of what you
want to share from a source with your readers.
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Paraphrasing can be very challenging! How do we keep the same idea but
change it to our own words? Don’t you need a source’s words to keep the idea?
Well, not necessarily. Think about the goal of bringing in a source to your paper,
which is to help prove your thesis statement. A source might say that 60% of
graduating seniors in the U.S. feel that standardized testing was “not helpful” in
preparing them for college, but your thesis statement might argue that we need
to find alternatives to standardized testing in public schools. How do you
rephrase that statistic to fit your argument while keeping the same main point?
We’ll look an example like that in the upcoming slides. One other point to keep
in mind is to think of your source as a “guest star” in your paper. I like the really
in-depth interviews that I see on The Daily Show. Jon Stewart does such a
great job when he talks with his interview subjects, especially those who write
about history. When we see an interview, we see paraphrasing take place,
because a guest star might say something like “We have seen an improvement
in employment for women in the past two generations, but there has been
slower improvement in cultural attitudes toward the role of women in the
workforce.” Jon might respond, “So we’re happy with women working, but not
necessarily out of the home?” Now that’s a joke that he’s cracking, but he’s
rephrasing the original words to keep the same idea in order to emphasize a
related point, that we as a culture are still getting comfortable with the idea of
the reality we already see of women working outside the home.
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Now that we get the basic concepts of paraphrasing and summarizing, we
should think a little bit about how we can make paraphrase and summary work
for us before we even write a draft! I want to share with you a writing concept
and exercise that changed my life when I was in graduate school, and after I
benefitted from this lesson I swore I would pass it on at every opportunity to
writing students in my classroom. Okay, let me start by asking you this: what
are the steps to the writing process? Can we think of all of them? The five
official steps of the Writing Process are pre-writing/brainstorming, drafting,
revising, editing/proofreading, and submitting/publishing. Now, which step is
where we typically start to paraphrase and summarize our sources in a
research paper? If I rewind six years or so and find myself just out of college, I
would say that I brought sources in no earlier than drafting, which is the second
step of the writing process. Now, I want you to think about how your whole
experience of writing a research project would change if you thought of bringing
in the research before even starting that first draft. For some of you the idea
seems very natural, and you might already have been using research while
brainstorming your topic for years– to you, I say kudos for being smarter than I
was! For others who might be looking for a change, a way to improve the
experience of writing a research paper, the notion of doing research while
brainstorming a topic might feel weird or oddly counterintuitive. How do you
know what you want to research before you know what you are focusing on in
the paper? That’s a good question, but let’s flip it over and ask this: How do you
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know what you are focusing on in the paper before you know what research is
out there? Research and brainstorming can go hand-in-hand, because as you
brainstorm or pre-write, you can also get a better idea of what it is you’d like to
focus on in the paper. We do this kind of “writing to learn” all the time in our daily
communications. Raise your hand if you have started an email to someone
about one thing, like an upcoming family reunion, but your email wound up
being about something entirely different, like remembering a dearly departed
loved one. Since what you wound up writing about was so deep and thoughtful,
you might decide to delete or make shorter the first part of the email, right? The
same thing can happen when we are thinking through what we want to write
about in a paper, research or other. Here’s the life-changing advice I got– are
you ready? Take some notes while you are researching. It helps you in two
ways. First, by reading and noting points from sources, you can help focus your
thoughts on what you want to write about. Second, by taking notes to get the
main points from the source, you can determine whether or not the source will
be useful to you. Start with the abstract or the introduction to an article or book;
that way, you can tell right away what to expect from the rest of the source and
whether or not you feel like you can use the information. The best way I have
ever found to take notes on a source is via Double-Entry Journaling, which I will
show you now. You might want to grab a piece of paper and a pencil if you
haven’t done so already!
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This is an exercise that I hope will help you gather sources for your research
and balance figuring out your focus while also evaluating how useful the source
is going to be. This is a hypothetical example of an Double Entry Journal. To
make a DEJ, you simply draw a line down the middle of a sheet of paper, or you
can build a table in Microsoft Word. (I’m old-fashioned and like the sheet of
paper and a pencil, myself.) On the left side of the line write down “Quotation,
summary, or paraphrase from source” and on the right, write “My questions,
agreements, disagreements, and other comments.” (Obviously you can make
this shorter as you need.) Then start putting down anything that you think could
be useful to you as you think about your research project. See a quotation you
might want to use? Write it down, or even just part of it, and make sure to
include the page number, since you’ll need that for your citations if you do
decide to use the source. Then on the right side, just across the line from the
quotation, write down your response. What do you think of when you see these
words? Why include them? Feel free to jot down questions, too, as they can
help you “think on paper” and “write to learn.” This way, you can balance those
dual purposes of thinking through your thesis statement and evaluating the
source and its usefulness to you in your writing.
You don’t have to directly quote the source; instead, you could start practicing
(ta da!) paraphrasing and summarizing points from the source! If you are not
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quoting directly, you won’t have as much of a need to keep track of the page
number where you found the information, as long as you get it down correctly in
your notes. And think of how nice it will be once you have thought through these
sources to have paraphrases and summaries ready to plug in to your paper as
you write instead of having to interrupt the flow of your writing to look through
the source and get the information!
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Let’s try out an example together. Jane is a student writing about education in
the U.S. Her thesis is “Long-term writing projects are a better measure of
student learning than multiple-choice exams.” She has a source that says this
sentence: ““52% of instructors responded that students demonstrated a better
understanding of the course material in their research projects than in traditional
midterm examinations” (p. 152).
I have a challenge for you. Pretend that you are Jane and that you want to
paraphrase the information from the source quotation using your own words to
prove your thesis statement that writing is better than multiple-choice testing.
Take a moment and then type your paraphrase in the chat area and we’ll take a
look at them. I realize this is on the spot, so don’t feel like it has to be perfect.
Just give it a try. Try to include APA citation as well, but don’t stress over it. The
focus should be on paraphrasing. How can you rephrase this quotation to fit the
thesis statement?
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Now that we’ve tried our hands at paraphrasing, let’s tackle a related challenge:
summarizing. In some ways, summarizing can be less difficult than
paraphrasing, because you are turning a large amount of text into a small
amount, and for me that makes it somewhat easier to change the wording to my
own. For other folks, though, summarizing is more difficult than paraphrasing,
because you have the same challenge of using your own words to rephrase a
source’s original idea, but instead of changing a source’s sentence into a
sentence of your own, you are now changing a whole paragraph or more of a
source into a sentence of your own! If thinking of our sources as guest stars
was helpful with paraphrasing, then I suggest we think of our sources as a
garden of information when we summarize. You only want to pick the
information that is ripe and ready to share with your readers, right? Think of
your source as having fields of information with lots of good ideas, but only a
few are going to be the very best for you. Again, think back to the original
purpose of bringing in a source. Why do you bring a source into your paper to
begin with? The goal of bringing in outside research is to support your central
argument or thesis statement, right? So what pieces of information from that
source support your thesis? Let’s try another example.
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Tom is writing a research paper about how colleges should accept certifications
and training for transfer credit from soldiers, nurses, and other professionals
with field experience. He has found a paragraph that could be very useful to
him, but he needs to boil it down to just one or two sentences. Pretend that you
are Tom and that you are using this longer excerpt to prove your thesis
statement, but you need to summarize what the source says in just a sentence
or two. Again, try to include the proper parenthetical citation, but focus most on
how you will put the source’s ideas into your own words.
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The best time to do a paper review in the Kaplan University Writing Center is
after you have written your first draft. When you come to us early, we can help
you the most by helping you with the structure of your paper. Many students
send papers at the last minute because they want us to simply proofread their
paper. However, KUWC writing tutors do not simply proofread the paper for
you; we want to help you learn to write and proofread your own papers. Since
you can come to the Writing Center 6 times a term, you can submit a first draft,
then submit a later draft if you need further help on an assignment.
If you need help before you write the first draft, you can use live tutoring. During
live tutoring, you can ask questions and brainstorm with a tutor. Live tutors can
help you with other stages in the paper writing process as well. Come visit us.
We can be found under the My Studies tab, then under Academic Support
Center.
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On the main Academic Support Center page, you will see the Writing Center
links. These include Live Tutoring, Paper Review Service, the Writing
Reference Library, Citation Guidelines, Workshops, English Language Learner,
and Fundamental writing help. Notice, you can access the Kaplan Guide to
Successful Writing on the right hand side in both print and audio form. Come
visit us.
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Here are two wonderful resources that can help you with paraphrasing and
summarizing. The first is our Basic Citation Guidelines, a helpful text resource
courtesy of our Writing Reference Library in the Kaplan University Writing
Center. The document outlines the most common kinds of citations and some
common sense guidelines for how to incorporate outside sources using
quotation, paraphrase, and summary. The second link is to an Effective Writing
Podcast given by Kurtis Clements, a wonderful member of our Writing Center
team. For those of you who like learning by listening as well as by reading,
please take ten minutes to sip on some tea or coffee and take notes on this
podcast. I hope you will explore other resources in the Writing Center, too!
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