Thursday, April 21, 2016

Putting Authors’ Ideas into Your Own Words: Summarizing and Paraphrasing

Summarizing and paraphrasing are two facets of the same thing, and that is to express what an author is trying to say in your own words without destroying the essence of his thoughts. While a paraphrase can be attributed to an original source without directly quoting this source and is typically shorter than the original text, summarizing has more to do with placing the key ideas in ones’ own words. Both summarizing and paraphrasing are skills that you need to master when writing an assignment. You will find that a quality assignment provider will be able to summarize and paraphrase relevant materials without distorting what the original text is saying.

                                                                                                  Tricks to summarize and paraphrase easily:
We all know how important it is to be able to convey an author’s views in your own language. This is an indication of how well you have understood his writings. Although expressing his opinions and ideas may appear to be a challenge at first, with practice, you will find it becoming simpler and simpler. Using thesaurus and dictionaries may be an excellent way to write an accurate summary of what you read. When you have a command over vocabulary, it is not at all difficult to play with words to give your writing a unique look and feel although your ideas may have been heavily borrowed from an external source.
In summarizing, we try to extract the key points in a text and then create a summary which covers all these points in a different language. There must be a marked distinction between your write-up and the original text. You can use different sentence structures or simplify the ideas given to give it a new look.  You may even use the keywords mentioned in the original text because at times it may not be wise to simplify these any further for fear of altering the meaning. At the same time, you can try to arrange these in a different way and combine these with other words for a more interesting read.
In a summary, you can even skip details that you may find unnecessary and focus on the ones which you believe to be integral to the text. You can shorten the main ideas and compile multiple ideas in a single sentence instead of devoting individual sentences to each. Presentation of ideas can also be manipulated as long as you do not end up distorting the meaning. So, while an original writing may deal with the main idea first followed by a broader context of issues, you can deal with the broader issues first and then narrow your scope down to the main idea when writing a summary. So, you are free to choose keywords that you feel are relevant and then pair these with other keywords to produce a unique write-up. An marketing assignment service provider is also at liberty to choose certain ideas and omit others according to his will.
In paraphrasing too, you can apply many of these afore-mentioned techniques. However, before you paraphrase, it is imperative that you have your own point of view about the text and you use this as a guideline. In paraphrasing, you are expected to rewrite the information present in the original text by using different words. The idea is not to make a brief outline of the original text; it is to rewrite the text using separate vocabulary. You do not quote information when you paraphrase; you understand the real essence of the text and then rewrite it. This means that you should continue to read the text thoroughly till you can grasp the real meaning. You must also verify that your version matches with what the original text is trying to convey.
Summary: 
To be able to write an assignment, it is important to know the art of summarizing and paraphrasing. Summarizing, quoting and paraphrasing are different techniques by which you can incorporate the works and ideas of others when writing your own assignments. These methods, together with a referencing system can help you write absolutely original assignments and avoid plagiarism. While in summarizing, you use only the main ideas in the original text and explain these in your own language, in paraphrasing, you simply rewrite the original text in your own words without shortening it. Summary can therefore present a wide overview while paraphrasing focuses on changing the word and sentence structure, without missing any details.