ENG1001 University English (I)

Weeks 4 - 5 Paraphrasing & Summarising

The work which you produce at university will mostly involve the important ideas, writings and
discoveries of experts or academics in your field of study. The works of other writers can provide you
with information, evidence and ideas, but must be incorporated into your work carefully. Paraphrasing
and summarising are different ways of including the works of others in your assignments.

You are expected to demonstrate an understanding of the major ideas/concepts which you have studied
from others’ works. If you have acquired the skills of paraphrasing and summarising, you can develop and
demonstrate your comprehension and interpretation of a text and to avoid plagiarism. They are important
tools for reshaping information to suit the many varied university writing tasks. They require analytical
and writing skills which are crucial to success at university.

Definitions

Paraphrasing is a way of presenting information, keeping the same meaning, but using different words
and phrasing. Paraphrasing is used with short sections of text, such as phrases and sentences.
A paraphrase may result in a longer, rather than shorter, version of the original text. It offers an alternative
to using direct quotations and helps students to integrate evidence / source material into assignments.

Summarising involves taking the main ideas from a piece of text and rewriting them in your own words.
A summary is an overview of a text. The main idea is given, but details, examples and formalities are left
out. Used with longer texts, the main aim of summarising is to reduce or condense a text to its most
important ideas.

Disucssion:

How is a paraphrase different from a summary?

Paraphrase Summary
Why are paraphrasing & summarising important?

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2. _______________________________________________________________________________

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3. _______________________________________________________________________________

Important points about paraphrasing

• You must provide a reference.

• The paraphrase must be entirely in your own words. You must do more than merely substitute
phrases here and there.
• You must also completely alter the sentence structure.
•

Tips for Paraphrasing

Whenever you paraphrase, consider:
1. Varying the choice of expressions (e.g., use synonyms, antonyms, and alternative expressions)
2. Changing parts of speech and sentence structures (e.g., use of nominalization; active passive;
simple  complex, use of different structures like relative clauses, present or past participles,
inversion and so on)
3. Reordering the sentences / ideas from the original (have to keep a coherent and logical flow of
information)

Examples

Original:
A variety of evidence points to the existence of dark matter in the universe. As it is not directly
observable with conventional astronomical techniques, we must rely on computer modules to guide our
understanding.
Source:

Lanzel, P.A., & Barnes, E.I. (2009). Global behavior of radial orbit instability. Journal of Undergraduate Research in Physics, 1-13.
 Paraphrase 1:
There is a variety of evidence that shows dark matter exists in the universe. It is not directly observable
with conventional astronomical techniques, so we must use computer models to guide our
understanding.

Paraphrase 2:
Research about the universe suggests that dark matter exists. However, scientists must use computer
models to learn about it as dark matter cannot be studied directly using ordinary techniques of
astronomy (Lanzel & Barnes, 2009).

What do you think about paraphrase 1? Answer the following questions:

Paraphrase 1 Paraphrase 2

1. Does the paraphrase use

synonyms?

2. Does the paraphrase change

the order of the ideas and
sentence structures?

3. Does the paraphrase include

a reference to the original
author?

Which paraphrase is better? Paraphrase _____

Activity 1

Find a synonym for the words/phrases that are underlined. Re-write each sentence using these new
words or phrases.

Example:

More than half of the women who attended the one-day meeting were in business with their spouses.

Possible answer:

The majority of the women who went to the one-day meeting were in business with their husbands.
1. With the development of flash memory cards, the market for portable music players jumped sharply.
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2. The engineer must judge how much dynamite to use according to the volume of material to be
removed from the tunnel.
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Activity 2

Rewrite the following sentences using the hints in the brackets.

1. Motorcycle racing is a dangerous sport. It is enjoyed by many young people. (Using relative clause)
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2. The most effective way to build your English skill is to study regularly. (Changing the parts of
speech)
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3. To improve English, you should learn new vocabulary on a daily basis. (Active voice  Passive
voice)

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Activity 3

Work with your course mates to paraphrase the following sentences to avoid plagiarism.
1. College students today are the first group of students to need the Internet for most of their homework.
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2. Anyone who has ever driven through the Mojave Desert knows that one should always carry a supply
of extra water.
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3. Of the 138 million acres of land that Native Americans owned in 1887, 90 million acres were taken
away by the whites by 1932.
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4. Drug resistance remains a major problem in combating HIV infection, but a different approach to
drug development could be the answer.
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Activity 4: Practice on paraphrasing a short paragraph

Paraphrase the following paragraphs.

1. The cause of autism has also been a matter of dispute. Its incidence is about one in a thousand, and it
occurs throughout the world, its features remarkably consistent even in extremely different cultures. It
is often not recognized in the first year of life, but tends to become obvious in the second or third
year.
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2. Traditionally, in oral and written discourses, the masculine pronoun ‘he’ was used as a pronoun to
refer to a person whose gender was unknown or irrelevant to the context. Recently, this usage has
come under criticism for supporting gender-based stereotypes and is increasingly considered
inappropriate (Smith, 2010, p. 24).
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Additional Exercises on Paraphrasing:

https://www.uts.edu.au/sites/default/files/Paraphrasing%20Handout%20-%20Activities.pdf

How to Summarise

1. Start by reading a short text and highlighting the main points as you read.
2. Reread the text and make notes of the main points, leaving out examples, evidence etc.
3. Without the text, rewrite your notes in your own words; restate the main idea at the beginning plus
all major points.

Source:

Paraphrasing, summarising and quoting. (2017). Retrieved from

https://student.unsw.edu.au/paraphrasing-summarising-and-quoting

Example 1
Original Passage:
“Children spend a very large proportion of their daily lives in school. They go there to learn, not only in a
narrow academic sense, but in the widest possible interpretation of the word – about themselves, about
being a person within a group of others, about the community in which they live, and about the world
around them. Schools provide the setting in which such learning takes place” (Leyden, 1985, p. 38).

A summary of this passage might look like this:

As Leyden (1985) points out, schools are places for children to learn about life, themselves, other
people, as well as academic information.
Schools are places for children to learn about life, themselves, other people, as well as academic
information (Leyden, 1985).

1. These summaries rely on some of the same keywords as the original: “schools,” “learn,” “other(s),”
“themselves,” and “academic.” This is because many concepts and ideas cannot be broken down to
a more basic level without losing their original meaning. The difference between the summary and
the original is that the keywords are arranged differently, and used in combination with new words.
2. A summary does not use all the ideas from the total pool available in the original version. In these
summaries, the meaning in the first sentence of the original (that children spend much of their daily
lives in school) has not been used. Other details are omitted (“the community in which they live”).
3. Instead of allocating a whole sentence to the point that “schools provide the setting in which such
learning takes place”, the idea is condensed and merged with the ideas in the second sentence
(“schools are places for children to …”).
4. Another difference from the original is the order in which the ideas are presented. For example, in
Leyden's version, she mentions the academic focus of learning first, followed by a broader context
of issues which children also learn about while they are at school. In contrast, the summary presents
the broader context of issues first followed by the academic focus of learning.
Source:

Paraphrasing and summarizing. (2012). http://owll.massey.ac.nz/referencing/paraphrasing-and-summarising.php

Example 2

Original text (103 words) Summarised text (31 words)

For most people, writing is an extremely difficult Inexperienced and even skilled writers can feel a
task if they are trying to grapple in their language great deal of anguish when faced with writing
with new ideas and new ways of looking at them. tasks; however, this response can be managed by
Sitting down to write can be an agonising recognising and coping with personal avoidance
experience, which doesn’t necessarily get easier strategies.
with the passage of time and the accumulation of
experience. For this reason you need to reflect
upon and analyse your own reactions to the task of
writing. That is to say, the task will become more
manageable if you learn how to cope with your
own particular ways avoiding putting off the
moment when you must put pen to paper.

Activity 5: Practice on summarising

1. Summarise the following passage in less than

35 words:

A social networking service is an online service,

platform, or site that focuses on helping people to
build social networks or social relations with
other people who share interests, activities,
backgrounds, or real-life connections. Most social
network services are web-based and provide
means for users to interact over the Internet.
Examples of social networking services are e-
mail, Facebook and Twitter. Social networking
sites allow users to share ideas, activities, events,
and interests. (72 words)

2. Summarise the following passage in less than

25 words:

Overall, the first two quarters have been

 profitable for the company. Nineteen of twenty
departments report cutting costs at least twenty
percent, and sales from fifteen departments have
risen five percent, or about $5 million. Despite
these positive developments, most department
heads believe that they will not be able to
maintain these levels for the remainder of the
year. (59 words)

3. Summarise the following passage in less than

40 words:

In order to communicate successfully with other

people, one must have a reasonably accurate idea
of what they do and do not know that is pertinent
to the communication. Considering people as
though they have knowledge that they do not
have can result in miscommunication and perhaps
embarrassment. On the other hand, a fundamental
rule of conversation is that one generally does not
convey to others information that one can assume
they already have. (74 words)

Activity 6: Practice on summarising an article

Summarise the following passage in about 100 words.

The marriages that Britain splits up

Caroline Pond sets off on Thursday on a 4,500-mile journey to visit her husband, Daniel, and two step-
children. Against their will, she and Daniel are forced to live in different continents.
The reason: Caroline is one of hundreds of British wives who are victims of a law which prevents their
foreign husbands joining them in this country. This law makes it almost impossible for a British woman
to marry a foreigner - unless she is prepared to live in her husband's native country. But the law, which
was intended to reduce the number of immigrants coining into the United Kingdom, does not apply to the
British male who marries a foreign woman. He is legally entitled to bring her to live with him in this
country.
'In the eyes of the law, women are second-class citizens,' Caroline says. 'In this country, we have about as
many rights as a dog which belongs to a man.'
Caroline, 27, is a demonstrator in physiology in the Zoology Department at Oxford University; Daniel is
an associate professor of biology at Michigan University. Before they married eight months ago, she
applied to the Home Office for permission for him to live in Britain. 'It is a waste of time,' she says. 'The
answer is always "never".'
For the sake of her career, Caroline wishes to stay in her job for at least another 18 months and the couple
were hoping to live in the small Victorian house she owns at Oxford. Ideally, while his wife is at the
university, Daniel would have liked to come here and write scientific text-books.
'We have both accepted that I should be the breadwinner,' Caroline says. 'Daniel has always looked after
the children and would continue to do so. I cannot understand why there is this discrimination against
women. After all, I pay the same taxes as a man.'
However, they have now resigned themselves to a commuter marriage for the next 18 months. During
their courtship and marriage, Daniel and Caroline have already crossed the Atlantic 20 times between
them. 'We are lucky, because we can afford to pay the fares, but there must be many women who cannot,'
she says.
Before she leaves finally to make her home in the United States, she is determined to campaign for the
reform of the law. 'I feel very strongly that if it is the last thing I do before I have to live in America, it
should be for this cause.'
The discriminatory measure, unchallenged in the House of Commons, was introduced in 1969 by James
Callaghan, then Home Secretary. He described it as an 'administrative measure' to stop abuse of the law
which allowed a male Commonwealth citizen to enter this country if he could prove that he was to marry
a British girl.
Two years later under the Conservatives, the Immigration Act took the matter even further by stating that
no foreign husband married to a British girl 'has claim to settlement in right of his wife unless... the
[Home] Secretary is satisfied that there are special considerations, whether of a family nature or
otherwise, which render exclusion undesirable'.
Mrs Mary Dines, of the Joint Council for the Welfare of immigrants, says that hardship has now been
defined by test cases as meaning that the wife would, if forced to live in her husband's country, suffer
through political persecution, race, creed or difference of culture.
She comments: 'if you can prove you were marrying a Nigerian and would have to live in the bush, you
would probably get off; but if you were marrying someone from, say, Cyprus, Greece or America, you
wouldn't stand a chance.'
Moves are now afoot in both Houses of Parliament to end this discrimination. In the Lords, the Labour
peer Lord Brockway has tabled a motion on equal immigration rights for women; and Mrs Lynda
Chalker, the new Conservative M.P. for Wallasey, will put down a question in the Commons this week.
Mrs Chalker is collecting a dossier of cases - already she has more than 150. She believes that few British
women are fully aware of the problems they may encounter if they consider marrying a foreigner and
feels that more publicity should be given to the possible consequences. 'We should let the poor girls know
what they are letting themselves in for,' she says.

Source: http://www.uefap.com/writing/exercise/report/marry.htm

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Homework

In a paragraph of not more than 100 words, sum up what the writer says about the causes of
conflict.

The causes of conflict

The evidence taken from the observation of the behavior of apes and children suggests that there are three
clearly separable groups of simple causes for the outbreak of fighting and the exhibition of aggressiveness
by individuals.

One of the most common causes of fighting among both children and apes was over the possession of
external objects. The disputed ownership of any desired object - food, clothes, toys, females, and the
affection of others - was sufficient ground for an appeal to force. On Monkey Hill disputes over females
were responsible for the death of thirty out of thirty-three females. Two points are of particular interest to
notice about these fights for possession.

In the first place they are often carried to such an extreme that they end in the complete destruction of the
objects of common desire. Toys are torn to pieces. Females are literally torn limb from limb. So
overriding is the aggression once it has begun that it not only overflows all reasonable boundaries of
selfishness but utterly destroys the object for which the struggle began and even the self for whose
advantage the struggle was undertaken.

In the second place it is observable, at least in children, that the object for whose possesion aggression is
started may sometimes be desired by one person only or merely because it is desired by someone else.
There were many cases observed by Dr Isaacs where toys and other objects which had been discarded as
useless were violently defended by their owners when they became the object of some other child’s
desire. The grounds of possessiveness may, therefore, be irrational in the sense that they are derived from
inconsistent judgments of value. Whether sensible or irrational, contests over possession are commonly
the occasion for the most ruthless use of force among children and apes.

One of the commonest kinds of object arousing possessive desire is the notice, good will, affection, and
service of other members of the group. Among children one of the commonest causes of quarrelling was
‘jealousy’ - the desire for the exclusive possession of the interest and affection of someone else,
particularly the adults in charge of the children. This form of behaviour is sometimes classified as a
separate cause of conflict under the name of ‘rivalry’ or ‘jealousy’. But, in point of fact, it seems to us that
it is only one variety of possessiveness. The object of desire is not a material object - that is the only
difference. The object is the interest and affection of other persons. What is wanted, however, is the
exclusive right to that interest and affection - a property in emotions instead of in things. As subjective
emotions and as causes of conflict, jealousy and rivalry are fundamentally similar to the desire for the
uninterrupted possession of toys or food. Indeed, very often the persons, property which is desired, are the
sources of toys and food.

Possessiveness is, then, in all its forms a common cause of fighting. If we are to look behind the mere
facts of behaviour for an explanation of this phenomenon, a teleological cause is not far to seek. The
exclusive right to objects of desire is a clear and simple advantage to the possessor obit. It carries with it
the certainty and continuity of satisfaction. Where there is only one claimant to a good, frustration and the
possibility floss is reduced to a minimum. It is, therefore, obvious that, if the ends of the self are the only
recognized ends, the whole powers of the agent, including the fullest use of his available force, will be
used to establish and defend exclusive rights to possession.

Another cause of aggression closely allied to possessiveness is the tendency for children and apes greatly
to resent the intrusion of a stranger into their group. A new child in the class may be laughed at, isolated,
and disliked and even set upon and pinched and bullied. A new monkey may be poked and bitten to death.
It is interesting to note that it is only strangeness within a similarity of species that is resented. Monkeys
do not mind being joined by a goat or a rat. Children do not object when animals are introduced to the
group. Indeed, such novelties are often welcomed. But when monkeys meet a new monkey or children a
strange child, aggression often occurs. This suggests strongly that the reason for the aggression is
fundamentally possessiveness. The competition of the newcomers is feared. The present members of the
group feel that there will be more rivals for the food or the attention of the adults.

Finally, another common source of fighting among children is a failure or frustration in their own activity.
A child will be prevented either by natural causes such as bad weather or illness or by the opposition of
some adult from doing something he wishes to do at a given moment - sail his boat or ride the bicycle.
The child may also frustrate itself by failing, through lack of skill or strength, to complete successfully
some desired activity. Such a child will then in the ordinary sense become ’naughty.’ He will be in a bad
or surly temper. And, what is of interest from our point of view, the child will indulge in aggression -
attacking and fighting other children or adults. Sometimes the object of aggression will simply be the
cause of frustration, a straightforward reaction. The child will kick or hit the nurse who forbids the sailing
of his boat. But sometimes - indeed, frequently - the person or thing that suffers the aggression is quite
irrelevant and innocent of offence. The angry child will stamp the ground or box the ears of another child
when neither the ground nor the child attacked is even remotely connected with the irritation or
frustration.

Of course, this kind of behaviour is so common that everyone feels it to be obvious and to constitute no
serious scientific problem. That a small boy should pull his sister’s hair because it is raining does not
appear to the ordinary unreflecting person to be an occasion for solemn scientific inquiry. He is, as we
should all say, ‘in a bad temper.’ Yet it is not, in fact, really obvious either why revenge should be taken
on entirely innocent objects, since no good to the aggressor can come of it, or why children being
miserable should seek to make others miserable also. It is just a fact of human behaviour that cannot
really be deduced from any general principle of reason. But it is, as we shall see, of very great importance
for our purpose. It shows how it is possible, at the simplest and most primitive level, for aggression and
fighting to spring from an entirely irrelevant and partially hidden cause. Fighting to possess a desired
object is straightforward and rational, however disastrous its consequences, compared with fighting that
occurs because, in a different and unrelated activity, some frustration has barred the road to pleasure. The
importance of this possibility for an understanding of group conflict must already be obvious.

(From Personal Aggressiveness and War by E. F. M. Durbin and John Bowlby)

Your summary:

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 References

Paraphrasing exercises. (n.d.). Retrieved on 29 June 2017 from

http://otmsmeredith.weebly.com/uploads/2/5/4/2/25423540/paraphrasing_exercise.pdf

Paraphrasing and summarizing. (2012). Retrieved from

http://owll.massey.ac.nz/referencing/paraphrasing-and-summarising.php

South Australian Certificate of Education. (n.d.). Academic writing skills: paraphrasing and summarising.
Retrieved on 31 July 2015 from https://www.sace.sa.edu.au/learning/research-advice/academic-
writing-skills

The University of New South Wales. (2015, 19 January). Paraphrasing, summarising and quoting.
Retrieved on 31 July 2015 from https://student.unsw.edu.au/paraphrasing-summarising-and-quoting

The University of Southern Mississipi. (n.d.). How to avoid plagiarism: paraphrasing and summarizing.
Retrieved on 2 July 2016 from http://www.lib.usm.edu/legacy/plag/paraphrasing.php

University of Toronto (n.d.). Paraphrase and summary. Retrieved on 2 July 2016 from
http://www.uc.utoronto.ca/paraphrase

University Writing Centre, Appalachian State University. (n.d.). Managing your sources: Quoting,
paraphrasing, summarizing and avoiding plagiarism. Retrieved on 30 June 2014 from
http://writingcenter.appstate.edu/sites/writingcenter.appstate.edu/files/Manging%20Your
%20Sources%2010-11..pdf