It is acceptable to report on other people's ideas in your own words as long as you follow a few rules.

There are two conventional ways of accomplishing this: paraphrasing and summarizing.

Learn the rules that surround these two concepts so that you do not commit an act of plagiarism:

Paraphrasing Information

To paraphrase is to restructure content into a new and unique text while keeping the message and idea of the original text. This text could be in the form of a simple sentence, an essay, an idea, or web content.

Tips when paraphrasing:

• Identify the main ideas of the source content.

• Reorganize the basic ideas in your own words. However, special words and quantifiers such as nouns can be taken from the original text.

• Replace other words with appropriate synonyms.

• Maintain the idea of the source text throughout the paraphrasing process.

• Avoid including new opinions that are not present in the original text.

• Acknowledge the author of the original text within the new content.

• The new text should be similar to the original source material in terms of word count and ideas.

To illustrate this, examine the following source text, and then read the paraphrase that follows it:

Young men were less likely to be engaged in school than young women and were more likely to report wanting to work/earn money as a reason for dropping out of high school. In contrast, teenage pregnancy plays a larger role in the decision to drop out of high school for young women. According to the Youth in Transition Survey, 15.9 percent of female drop-outs left high school because they were pregnant or because they need to tend for their child.¹

As Bowlby suggests, the major reasons why most young men and women of today don't express the urge to complete their high school programs are numerous. For young men, the need to work and earn money for themselves is more preferable to going to high school. In comparison, most younger women leave high school as a result of teenage pregnancy and the need to fend for their child. Youth in Transition survey also reports that 15.9 percent of young female drop-outs are affected by this phenomenon.

Analysis

Referring to the earlier paraphrasing tips, observe how the original text is reorganized into a new, different outlook. Information from the source text is synthesized in the paraphrased text.

Conclusion

Paraphrasing and summarizing are skills that require students to process information and express it in their own words. This activity improves students' understanding of a topic. They must express their understanding of a topic in a text or a presentation after an exercise in active reading and listening.

Paraphrasing is a restatement of the original text but written in the student's own words. It is therefore about as long as the original text. Summarizing is an overview of the original text—in the student's own words—of the vital information from source media. It is always shorter than the original text.