Mom's Famous Paraphrase Recipe

A Spoonful of Ego

When you have something to say, use your own sentence structure and words to
say it. Introduce and integrate the primary and secondary sources with your own
ideas, and cite the source, including appropriate page numbers. In your paper, keep your own ideas and evaluations of sources primary.

Monosaccharide is still Sugar: The Big Word Trick

Do not substitute synonyms for some or most of the words in an author's
passage. This is considered plagiarism, even if you provide the source.

One Heaping Lump of Objectivity

Separate your report of what the source said from your interpretation of, or
commentary on, the author's idea.

Example: In his Interpretation of Dreams, Sigmund Freud argues that dreams represent disguised wishes of the unconscious. But he admits that a dream can only be analyzed once the dreamer articulates the dream, so how can we tell that the dreamer does not impose his/her conscious wishes onto the dream? There is no way to access the purely visual language of the unconscious; thus we cannot separate the conscious from the unconscious in the analysis of dreams.

The Sweet Taste of an Original

Quote a source if a paraphrase is a poor low-calorie substitute, either because you wish to analyze the way in which an idea is expressed or feel the source to be particularly expressive, even rhetorically perfect. Then check the quotation against your original source and provide a citation.

How to Source