Reading and writing fill in the blanks

Paraphrasing is often defined as putting a passage from an author into your own words. However, what are your own words? How different must your paraphrase be from the followingotheroriginalrest original ? The answer is it should be considerably different. The whole point of paraphrasing is to show you have read and understood another person's ideas, and can summarize them in your own writing style rather than lendingbringingborrowingdebiting borrowing their phrases. If you just change a few words, or add some bits of your own to an otherwisenewlyhowevertotally otherwise reproduced passage, you will probably be penalized for plagiarism. You should aim to condense and simplify a writer's ideas and describe them useduseusingto use using different sentence structures and expressions.