 Welcome to this workshop on paraphrasing and synthesising resources presented to you by the language and learning support team as part of your orientation workshops. The language and learning support team is based under library services. Charles Darwin University acknowledges the traditional custodiums of the land on which we're meeting and pays respect to elders both past and present and extends that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. Let's begin by some simple ways that you can integrate a citation into your writing. There are two common positions to put a citation, front position and end position. Let's look at the front position first. As you see in the first sentence, the pattern that you adopt is very straightforward. Family name and the year in brackets and then the reporting verb. It's important to note that when you're using a referencing system, you should check which components are required in the in-text citation. For the purposes of today's workshop, we're going to focus on the APA system and the APA system does not require a front initial or the given name. It requires only the family name, year and reporting verb. Sentence number two adds a second name. Notice that between the first and second name is the word and. Remember that if you're following the APA system, you don't use the symbol for and when you integrate the citation into the full sentence. The third example uses the et al abbreviation et al, which in Latin means and the others is a useful way of reducing a study or a piece of research which has got multiple names. So the rule that we follow with APA is three or more names you use et al. Another thing that's important to note is when you do use et al, make sure there's a full stop after the L. The first three examples used paraphrasing. Let's have a look at a final example which uses a direct quotation. Terian and Doused 2012 page 321 stated. Two things to notice here. First of all, notice in the brackets that there is a page number given and then after stated, you've got speech marks to indicate that it is a direct quotation. Now let's look at end position integration. As you can see, the difference in end position citations is that the name goes inside the bracket and it's also integrated inside the sentence. So make sure that the full stop goes after the end bracket and not before. In the second example, we have two names. Notice this time that the symbol for and is used rather than the word. So always remember with the APA system, if you're using a front position citation with two names, you use the word and. And if you're using an end position citation within the brackets, you use the symbol for and instead. The third example, as before, is multiple names, three or more. And what is a very common error now is that students forget the full stop because it seems strange to have a full stop and a comma next to each other. But remember that that is OK. And finally, again, we've got a direct quotation and notice how this is done. We end the sentence with a speech mark, then we have the names with the symbol for and because there are two names. And we've got the page number, page three, two, one, and it's integrated inside the sentence. So the full stop goes after the end bracket. When you're using APA, you have two choices. You can use past simple, which is the second sentence. Tucker 2006 argued that, or you can use the present perfect. Tucker 2006 has argued that. You do not need to worry about the difference between these. And if you want to be safe, then simply use past simple all the time. Now remember our presentation today is a basic introduction. So there are other ways to integrate a citation into your writing. But if you want to do that, you can go to the library website and download the APA referencing guide. So you can find all the information that you need on the library website. And liaison librarians can help you with both research and referencing. And I've provided the link to the referencing section of the CDU library website. Let's move on now to paraphrasing. And before we start, here are two questions that I would like you to consider. Remember that you can always stop the video if you need to have time to think. And you can rewind if there's anything that you need to check again. Consider the following questions. Number one, how do you decide when to use a direct quotation and a paraphrase? And number two, what's the difference between a paraphrase and a summary? If you need time to think, stop the video now. Question one depends on several factors. Certain faculties, which are known as colleges in CDU will have expectations about how they want referencing to be done. And over time, you will need to learn what these expectations are. As well as at the college level, lecturers may have an individual preference about the use of direct quotation and paraphrase. Again, get to know the personal preference of your lecturer. In some faculties or colleges, paraphrasing is generally encouraged while direct quotation or the overuse of direct quotation is discouraged. But there are times when a direct quotation does make sense. For example, if you're quoting a national standard, a government policy and things like that, it doesn't make sense to paraphrase it and a direct quotation would be appropriate. Academics commonly borrow definitions from seminal works. In other words, seminal means important. So a common thing for academics to do is to give a definition that is the agreed upon or the commonly used definition within that field. And that's often from a seminal piece of work. So you'll see direct quotation used in research papers when they are doing this. Sometimes the author expresses an idea in such an effective and concise way that you cannot improve it. And that would be a third example of when a direct quotation would be a good choice. Moving on to question two, what is the difference between a paraphrase and a summary? Paraphrasing and summaries use the same strategies, but generally speaking a summary is a reduced text where the student has extracted the key points from a longer text and is presenting them in a shorter text. But in order to do that, as well as identifying the key points, the student must also paraphrase the sentence before joining them into a paragraph of his or her own. So therefore a summary and a paraphrase use the same strategies. A paraphrase is generally one or two sentences long and a summary is a reduced text from a longer text. Let's now start to look at the specifics of paraphrasing effectively. And before we do that, here are some more focus questions that I want you to think about. Remember to stop the video to give yourself time to think. Question one, how different to the original statement should my paraphrase be? It can be useful to think in terms of a percentage for this. Number two, what strategies can I employ when paraphrasing? And question three, do I need to provide a reference when I paraphrase? Stop the video for a few moments now. Question one, how different to the original statement should my paraphrase be? There's no full response to this. We can only use common sense and experience. One of the things that we need to consider is that when we think about plagiarism, there's more than one way of understanding it. When we fail to give a reference for something, that's called plagiarism of ideas. But if our sentence is too similar in terms of its language and structure to the original, this is also considered a form of plagiarism. Let's call this second form plagiarism of language. Therefore, in answer to question one, if you want your paraphrased sentence not to be considered plagiarism of language, it needs to be substantially different from the original. It does not need to be 100% different because sometimes you will use technical words that there is not a synonym for. But we can do a rule of thumb which is approximately 70% or 80% different and then you will avoid the risk of plagiarism of language. We'll show an example of this in a few moments. What strategies can I employ when paraphrasing? To answer question two, there are basically three strategies. Change the grammar, change the words, change the order of information. Now within those, there are specific strategies that we can talk about which we'll move on to soon. But let's repeat that because these are the basic three areas. Change the grammar, change the words, change the order of information. And finally, do I need to provide a reference when I paraphrase? Of course the answer to this question is yes because you are borrowing someone else's ideas. Let's practice some of these concepts before we look in more detail at the strategies. Read the following sentence and paraphrase it in your own words. The students who followed their teacher's advice improved their English. This is taken from a book by Smith in 2019. Remember to stop the video and give yourself time to do the exercise. On this slide, we have been provided with an example paraphrase. The pupils that use their instructor's information got better at English. We consider this a poor paraphrase and there are several reasons why. Stop the video and have a think why this is considered a poor paraphrase. It's considered a poor paraphrase for several reasons. Of course the most obvious reason is that there is no citation at the end of the sentence. That is plagiarism of ideas. However, if you look at the sentence, it is a word for word copy of the original. The students is replaced with pupils. The word who is replaced with that. Followed is replaced with used. The teacher is replaced with their instructor and so on. Clearly this first paraphrase attempt is too similar in terms of language and structure to the original sentence. Therefore it is a poor example. It's also a poor example because some of the words do not comfortably fit as synonyms. For example, the word pupil suggests a younger age group than student. The word advice is a person's opinion and the word information is factual. So therefore some of the synonyms do not work. Therefore overall this is considered a poor example. On this slide we have a more effective example. Let's read it together. By following the language instructor's advice, most of the students made progress in their English. Smith 2019. The first thing to note is that this sentence has a correct citation in the end position. So we have avoided the risk of plagiarism of ideas. But if you look at the structure of the sentence, we could say that it is substantially different from the original. Therefore it avoids the risk of plagiarism of language. The grammar has changed and many of the words have changed. We should note however that the word advice has been kept. Remember that information did not work as a paraphrase. Therefore we're going to keep the word advice. And students has been kept because we decided that pupils was a different age group. So the point here is that the sentence is not 100% different from the original. The guideline that we're providing you is significantly different. And I suggested that 70% or 80% difference would be effective. We can summarise some of the concepts that we've been talking about with four simple principles for effective paraphrasing. Number one, paraphrase the idea, not the words. That means you should never do a word for word paraphrase. Number two, aim to substantially change the sentence structure and vocabulary. It doesn't need to be 100% different, but 70% or 80% is a good rule of thumb. Number three, avoid adding, omitting or changing key information. And number four, of course, always reference. Finally, here is the original and the more effective paraphrase side by side. Now that we've looked at the four key principles of effective paraphrasing, let's consider in more detail our paraphrasing strategies. You will recall that there are three basic approaches. You can change the words, you can change the grammar, you can change the order of information. But within those three broad strategies, we're going to have some smaller subtopics to talk about. Strategy one, change the words. As we stated before, sometimes you cannot find a suitable synonym. We decided, for example, that students didn't have a suitable synonym and the word advice didn't have a suitable synonym. So we kept those in the sentence. We also kept the word English, but English we could discuss. You may feel that if we change the word English to the language skills, it would be an acceptable synonym. Remember that we don't change key information, but if the sense of the sentence remains, we can change the word. But what we did change was teacher to language instructor and improved to made progress. You have to decide when the synonym is effective and when it's not. But remember, you don't need to feel that you need to change the sentence 100%. 70% or 80% is acceptable. The other strategies that we can use are changing the grammar and changing the order of information. In the original sentence, the grammar is who followed. And in the paraphrase, it was by following. This is called a gerund or preposition plus ing. This is an example of the grammar changing. Changing from active to passive would be another example of the grammar changing or changing the part of speech from noun to verb or verb to adjective would be other examples of grammatical changes. But in our example sentence, we also changed the order of information. In the original sentence, students is in the first part of the sentence and in the paraphrase, students is in the second part of the sentence. So in summary, there are here examples of the grammar and order of information changes which you are available to do. We're going to finish our short workshop with some paraphrasing practice. As usual, you need to stop the video in order to do this exercise. You'll need a piece of paper and a pen. I've provided three sentences. For the purposes of this paraphrasing practice, we don't need to worry about the reference. We're just going to practice the three strategies of change the words, change the grammar, change the order. Here are the three sentences. Number one, an effective paraphrase has the same meaning of the original. Number two, it's essential to plan carefully before you start writing. And number three, the thesis statement indicates how the essay title will be approached. Stop the video now and practice paraphrasing these three sentences. And remember, for this exercise, we don't need a reference. For each of the example sentences, we have provided two paraphrases. You should analyse them to think about whether they fulfil our criteria. Remember, the principles include ensure that your sentence is substantially different, paraphrase the ideas, not the words, and avoid changing the meaning. When you've compared the example paraphrases, compare them to your own sentences and think about those principles. In our short orientation workshop today, we've reviewed the basics of how to integrate citations into your writing. Front position and end position are very, very common. Remember that there are lots of other ways of doing it, but for you to do that, you can have a look at the library website and find out more about APA referencing by going to the section of the library website that focuses on that. We also reflected on when to use direct quotations and paraphrasing. Then we reviewed the basics of how to paraphrase and we finished by practicing. I hope you found our short orientation video on paraphrasing and synthesising resources helpful. Visit our webpage to find out about the full range of support available to students by going to this website, or you can contact us at languageandlearningsupport.edu.au. Thank you for your time and best of luck with this semester.