How to Rephrase a Sentence to Avoid Plagiarism?
Plagiarism is a big problem that is faced by almost every writer. Students, in particular, can have trouble with plagiarism since they have to write assignments on a regular basis, and they have to take help from previously published online material.
But, fortunately, there are a couple of different ways in which plagiarism can be avoided (and removed, if already committed). One such method that can be employed for this purpose is rephrasing.
By rephrasing a piece of content, you can get rid of any duplication that it may have accidentally picked up from a source on the internet. If you don’t know how to properly rephrase your sentences, don’t worry. In this post, that is what we’re going to be looking at.
Rephrasing a Sentence to Avoid Plagiarism
Here are the steps that you can follow to effectively rephrase sentence to avoid plagiarism.
1. Read and Understand the Sentence
This is actually something that we should explain a little before moving on.
Basically, when we talk about rephrasing a sentence or a passage, we refer to making such changes that do not alter the original meaning or context.
So, since the process of rephrasing the sentence has to be done while keeping the context intact, it is necessary for us to know what it (the context) actually is.
That is essentially the reason why you have to read the sentence properly before rephrasing it. Doing so will enable you to make such changes that don’t ruin the original meaning.
2. Replace Words with Their Synonyms
Then, once you are done understanding the context of the text, you can move on to affecting the actual changes themselves.
The first step in doing this is to simply select some random words in the sentence, and replace them with appropriate synonyms.
Here is an example:
The boy was walking when he saw a penny on the ground, shining brightly in the midday sun.
The boy was strolling when he saw a coin on the ground, glittering brightly in the midday sun.
Usually, if the purpose of rephrasing a sentence is to remove plagiarism from it, then even this type of sparing changing can be enough since they eliminate the exact replication.
But, if doing this alone doesn’t work, you can try out some other techniques as well…which we will be discussing now.
3. Change the Voice (Active to Passive, Passive to Active)
This is also a useful technique that you can use to rephrase a sentence.
Changing the voice from active to passive, and vice versa can alter the overall look of the text quite a lot. Here, you can see this in an example:
The boy closed the door and then kicked the bed.
The door was closed by the boy and then the bed was kicked by him.
Although the quality and flow of the sentence are pretty much ruined, the purpose of making it look different is achieved.
When applying this technique, you can use it along with the synonymizing method. In other words, you don't have to change the voice in every instance of the sentence. You can change the voice once and then add some synonyms to complete the job. For example, if we take the same sentence that we did above, we get:
The lad closed the door and then, the bed was kicked by him.
Once again, it ruins the flow, but we do get a significantly changed look.
4. Online Rephrasing Tools
The steps for rephrasing that we’ve mentioned above are well and good, but sometimes, it can be a bit of a hassle to do everything manually. Or, sometimes, you may just not have the time to study the sentence and then make the changes deliberately to it.
An online rephrase tool can be a great solution in this sort of situation.
These tools basically make different types of changes i.e., the ones that we’ve mentioned above, on their own. The results are provided in a matter of seconds, and the whole process is simplified.
Conclusion
Rephrasing a sentence for avoiding plagiarism is not very hard. You just have to read it a couple of times to get an idea of the context, and then you have to make some changes, like the ones we’ve mentioned above.
In situations where manually making the changes is difficult or not possible, paraphrasing tools can be a suitable alternative method.
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