Before going strictly into the concept of paraphrasing, it is worth clarifying the term from which it derives: paraphrase.
A paraphrase is a figure of speech, that is, a way of saying something, either orally or in writing. It consists of reproducing roughly what another person said or wrote. And the concrete action is to paraphrase. Its purpose is to provide greater clarity to an idea, which is more easily understood.
The term paraphrase is to paraphrase a text or writing. Paraphrasing is not the exact reproduction of the text, it is a clarification or explanation of the content under analysis. The reader who intends to paraphrase a text must read it carefully, underline the main and secondary ideas and, finally, write the paraphrase based on the interpretation of the main ideas contained in the text, another way to make a paraphrase, is the use of synonymy to change words without altering the syntax of the text.
There are different types of paraphrase: the mechanical paraphrase is responsible for the use of synonyms, or the substitution of phrases or expressions with minimal syntactic changes, the constructive paraphrase is written another announced one, with very different characteristics but maintaining the main idea of the text under study.
It is common for a journalist to decide to paraphrase a personality when reporting a news story. If the journalist must refer to the speech delivered by a government minister, it is likely that he will almost never quote, but rather paraphrase the most important concepts (that is, convey them in his own words).
Teachers, on the other hand, often paraphrase the authors they take as a reference to address a certain topic. A professor of biology, to mention one case, can paraphrase Charles Darwin when narrating the theory of evolution. Even the study materials used by students do not usually include all the original texts: instead, they present short quotes and long paragraphs of paraphrases that state the main ideas.
Paraphrasing “Paraphrasing” is very useful to analyze a text that we have read or a documentary that we have seen, for example, since it forces us to explain in our own words the content we have incorporated and leads us to ask questions and review it to fix Certain concepts Through this simple yet challenging technique, we can improve our comprehension skills while becoming more effective communicators.
