
Unit 8: Paraphrasing
What is it?
Paraphrasing is when you read a piece of work and then rewrite it in your own words while retaining the ‘flavour’ and ‘ideas’ of the original text. Paraphrasing demonstrates that you have understood the academic context of the piece and allows you to support your argument. Watch this video from Dr Jane McKay of the Learning Development Centre in Health and Life Sciences. It will help you understand what you need to do.
Top Tips on paraphrasing Below is information on the Irish Famine. Read it and try paraphrasing the piece.
Source: Interpreting The Irish Famine, 1846-1850 It began with a blight of the potato crop that left acre upon acre of Irish farmland covered with black rot. As harvests across Europe failed, the price of food soared. Subsistence-level Irish farmers found their food stores rotting in their cellars, the crops they relied on to pay the rent to their British and Protestant landlords destroyed. Peasants who ate the rotten produce sickened and entire villages were consumed with cholera and typhus. Parish priests desperate to provide for their congregations were forced to forsake buying coffins in order to feed starving families, with the dead going unburied or buried only in the clothes they wore when they died. Landlords evicted hundreds of thousands of peasants, who then crowded into disease-infested workhouses. Other landlords paid for their tenants to emigrate, sending hundreds of thousands of Irish to America and other English-speaking countries. But even emigration was no panacea – ship owners often crowded hundreds of desperate Irish onto rickety vessels labelled "coffin ships." In many cases, these ships reached port only after losing a third of their passengers to disease, hunger and other causes. While Britain provided much relief for Ireland's starving populous, many Irish criticized Britain's delayed response -- and further blamed centuries of British political oppression on the underlying causes of the famine. |
Click here to see an example of the Irish Famine paraphrased.
SMILE by Imperial College, Loughborough University and the University of Worcester, modified by Marion Kelt Glasgow Caledonian University is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.