How Paraphrasing Can Help Students Write Better Assignments

How Paraphrasing Can Help Students Write Better Assignments

Assignments play a crucial role in students’ lives because they shape their research, critical thinking and writing skills. But students often find it challenging to write top-notch assignments. And one of the main reasons for this issue is the content quality of assignments.

Even with excellent research, most students fail to write high-quality content for their assignments. And if you are one of those students, this blog post is for you.

Here, we’ll demonstrate how paraphrasing can help write better assignments with different examples. So, without any further delay, let’s begin.

A Quick Overview of Paraphrasing

Paraphrasing is a prevalent technique. Therefore, different sources have defined it in their way. That is why before explaining the concept of paraphrasing, we’ll discuss its definition by borrowing it from Dictionary.com.

According to Dictionary.com, paraphrasing is:
“A restatement of a text or passage giving the meaning in another form, as for clearness; rewording” (Dictionary.com).

From the above definition, we can understand that when you change the wording of a sentence or paragraph to clarify its meaning, you perform paraphrasing. But it’s crucial to note that the meaning of the paraphrased information must be the same as the source text. Otherwise, you will ruin the concept of paraphrasing.

So, once you’ve reworded a piece of information in your words, you must credit the original information owner. Otherwise, you can fall prey to plagiarism.

How Is Paraphrasing Crucial for Creating Top-Notch Assignments?

By now, you may have become familiar with the concept of paraphrasing. So, let’s discuss how paraphrasing can improve the different aspects of your assignment with the help of examples.

  • Improves Content Clarity

Content clarity is one of the critical aspects of a better-written assignment because it helps the readers easily understand the meaning. And as the definition of paraphrasing indicates, this technique clarifies the text by rewording it. So, you can improve your assignment’s quality by clarifying its content through paraphrasing. However, let’s see the practical implementation of this statement through an example.

To illustrate how paraphrasing can improve content clarity, let’s take a sample of a complex sentence.

Sample Text: Despite the plethora of ameliorative options available, the recalcitrant nature of the malady precluded any substantial amelioration of the patient’s condition.

Disclaimer: We have highlighted the difficult-to-understand terms in the ‘Sample Text’.

As you can see, the above sentence looks hard to read. Even Grammarly has detected the hard-to-read nature of the above sample.

Let’s paraphrase this (complex) sentence now and improve its clarity.

Paraphrased Form: Despite the numerous potential remedies, the stubborn nature of the disease prevented any significant improvement in the patient’s condition.

As you can see, the paraphrased form contains simple alternatives of complex terms, such as ‘numerous,’ ‘remedies,’ ‘stubborn,’ ‘disease,’ ‘prevented,’ ‘significant’ and ‘improvement.’ So, that’s how you can improve your assignment’s content clarity through paraphrasing.

  • Enhances Vocabulary and Makes Content More Engaging

Proper vocabulary usage is another crucial aspect of a high-quality assignment because it can make content more engaging. And paraphrasing can help you master this aspect.

When you change text’s wording during paraphrasing, doing so exposes you to new words and phrases. And when you use new terms or phrases in a particular context, you understand their meanings. So, having multiple alternatives to a word or phrase makes it possible to express the same idea in various ways. But that’s not it.

Using alternative words and phrases can make the content more engaging, precise and effective. So, let’s understand this through an example.

Here is an example of a bland sentence:

Sample Text: The weather was warm and sunny.

Now, we’ll enrich the above sentence with interesting vocabulary during paraphrasing.

Paraphrased Form: It was a nice, beautiful day.

As you can see, the ‘Paraphrased Form’ contains better wording and has a different sentence structure, which makes it more appealing. So, that’s how you can paraphrase the text and improve your content’s quality through vocabulary enhancement.

  • Brings Brevity and Modifies Sentences Structure

Undoubtedly, sentences that clearly describe their purpose are essential for a writing piece’s quality. But the length of a sentence is another vital aspect that shapes the quality of content. That’s because readers can often lose the context while reading a lengthy sentence. Therefore, it is essential to write clear and short sentences. And paraphrasing can help you do that.

Bringing brevity or conciseness to the content is another significant benefit of paraphrasing. However, let’s see how you can achieve this benefit of paraphrasing through an example.

For the purpose of this example, we’ll take a sample of a long sentence with redundant wording.

Sample Text: Despite the fact that the company’s profits have been decreasing, we are still able to maintain a stable financial situation.

Now, we’ll paraphrase it.

Paraphrased Form: Although profits have dropped, our finances remain stable.

As you can see, we have removed all the unnecessary words while paraphrasing the text. And even with a shorter length, the ‘Paraphrased Form’ describes the same meaning as the ‘Sample Text’. Hence, that’s how you can use paraphrasing in your assignment and bring brevity to its content.

Some Tips to Effectively Paraphrase Any Material

As you can see, paraphrasing can improve the different aspects of content, which means creating a better-written assignment is possible through paraphrasing. But you can only enjoy the benefits of paraphrasing if you know how to do it. Therefore, here are some tips to help you effectively paraphrase the content:

• Paraphrasing is only possible after understanding the gist of the original text. So, read the original material thoroughly until you comprehend its meaning.
• While reading, you can highlight the essential details. For instance, generally, the first sentence of a paragraph describes its purpose. So, you can read the first sentence of every paragraph to understand what that particular passage addresses.
• After gathering the meaning of the source text, write it in your words without looking at the source text. That’s because the goal is to write in your words through your understanding.

Thus, once you’ve implemented these tips, you can paraphrase any material effectively.

But suppose the rephrased form doesn’t look unique or doesn’t meet your expectations. In that case, you can use the assistance of AI-based paraphrasing tools.

AI rephrasing tools are good at changing the text in a variety of ways. A good paraphrasing tool typically has multiple modes of rephrasing. And each mode alters the text in a different way. This means that there is a bigger chance of getting content according to your liking.

Conclusion

Assignments are essential in education since they allow instructors to evaluate what students have learned, motivate them to engage with the material, practice critical thinking and build research and writing abilities. All these elements are necessary for a student’s educational and career progress because a better assignment will lead to a better grade.

But a student will only score a better grade with extensive research and better writing. That’s because research will help find relevant material and writing will help shape that material correctly. However, even with proper research, students sometimes fail to write top-notch assignments because of poor content quality.

Thus, read the above discussion to learn how to improve the assignment writing skills with the help of paraphrasing.

APA References

Dictionary.com. Paraphrase Definition & Meaning | Dictionary.com. Dictionary.com. https://www.dictionary.com/browse/paraphrase