On Paraphrasing

 My students taught me something the other day. Paraphrasing can mean two different things. There's an easy version, and a hard version and -- you guessed it -- the easy version is what you might be most familiar with, but it is the hard version that you need for your literature review.

The easy version is when you take a quote, change some of the key words (perhaps with a trusty thesaurus), maybe alter the sentence structure a bit, and Voila! The quote is now in your own words, you give the author attribution, and you're good to go.  

But are you? Notice that in the easy version, you don't really have to fully understand the quote, or how it might or might not be evidence for why your research question needs to be asked. You could even do this by picking a quote at random from any source.  Paraphrasing this way is mostly a surface operation -- you don't have to think very hard about it. And why are you paraphrasing this way? Is it because you feel you have too many quotes already so you're going to paraphrase for a while? This too is surface-y. Deciding when to quote and when to paraphrase should be based on your engagement with your sources -- the dialogue you have with them when you are figuring out how patterns and trends in previous work add up to why your research question needs to be asked. Who agrees with you? Who doesn't? Whose work aligns with yours? Whose work gets close, but doesn't quite hit the mark? What will you 'say back' to these sources in your literature review as you establish why your research needs to be done? Where will you place them in those patterns and trends you have traced out?

Deciding when to quote and when to paraphrase on the basis of your on-going dialogue with previous work in your field requires the more complex version of paraphrasing.  This is not a surface operation, but an act of understanding. True paraphrasing emerges from a deep understanding of someone else's argument and a true appreciation for what their argument means for your research question. What is the crux of what someone is saying? Can you state that clearly in a few sentences, in words that a) show that you clearly understand; and b) would make sense to someone who had not read the source? You won't get to this by tinkering with surface features. You can only do this when you really understand the essence of what a previous piece of work sought to find out, and what they ultimately found (or didn't find, as the case may be).

And how do you get to this point? Practice. Take a piece of previous work from your pile of literature review sources -- a shorter piece, and one that you do have a good understanding of -- one that you read and said, 'Ah -- now that makes sense'.  Read it again. Several times. Now set it aside.  Give yourself a limit of 5 lines.  Try for something like this: The authors, interested in X, do a study on Y, and find Z. Remember that this is not a fill-in-the-blank exercise.  What you put for X, Y, and Z should be a fair assessment, in your own words, of what the authors were seeking to do. And remember that you must put the author attribution, as well -- a paraphrase is still someone else's thought. If it helps, try paraphrasing out loud to yourself first, as though you were telling a friend about this really interesting paper you had read, and then writing that down.  Or maybe tell a friend for real, if you have a particularly patient friend (😊), and then do your paraphrase.

As you get better and better at this -- and you will, if you practice -- graduate to more complex pieces. You'll find you are paraphrasing authentically, as part of your engagement with previous work and how it is evidence for why your research needs to be done, rather than tinkering with surface features for superficial reasons.