Summarizing is a very important step in writing. You don’t have to keep your content long and flood your words just to prove you can write more. It only makes the quality of your writing weak.

It is not bad to have lots of ideas and express it into your own words while writing your topic down. Besides, it’s a lot better than to be stuck in your writing for hours.

But you don’t have to make your content long. You have to summarize all your ideas down into smaller pieces. Not just your ideas but also the words that you use in every paragraph of your content.

Same goes in paraphrasing. If you summarize your content, then you can paraphrase your draft to make it concise and better than the original one.

These two steps are very useful in any writing task. Most writers use to practice these steps to improve their writing and also the quality of their content.

It is not a good idea to copy someone’s work just to help you summarize your own work. The key is to summarize and paraphrase your own writing using your own words. You need to cut out those excess words that are not necessary in your content or rephrase your sentences into a better one.

Many beginners tend to forget the essence of these two processes in writing. No matter how busy you are, when it comes in dealing you writing, you need to take actions to make it a better one.

In academic writing, summarizing and paraphrasing are very essential skills. With majority of college writing essays geared towards proving a point, you will very likely need to depend on a lot of source material to effectively argue your case.

First, a bit of refresher:

– Summarizing is all about reducing a material down to its most important points, often bringing it down to roughly a third or less of the original source.
– Paraphrasing, on the other hand, is about restating a passage in your own words, often as an alternative to using a direct quotation.

In the case of your college essays, you will employ both techniques to integrate evidence from previous writing into your own work. If you’re struggling to put together either type, the following advice might help.

Summarizing

– Scan the text.
– Locate and highlight the main points. A good first place to look for are the topic sentences on each paragraph.
– Rewrite the material using the main points you found, setting aside evidence and examples.

Paraphrasing

– Review the source text.
– Rewrite it in your own words.
– Use reporting verbs and phrases to show attribution.
– Put unique and author-driven phrases in quotes.

Like other parts of your essays, summaries and paraphrases are best done with the help of a competent writing software. While the thoughts you will express in them aren’t original, the words you will be using are and they’ll be best served with a dose of polish from such a tool.

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Category: Writing
Keywords: academic writing, paraphrasing, summaries