The Rewards of Paraphrasing; Paraphrasing Student Guide: 7 Simple Steps

For years, university students of all age groups, learning styles, educational levels, and different cultural backgrounds have at some point struggled with paraphrasing. This may be due to stress, nearing submission dates, limited topic knowledge, or most commonly a lack of self-confidence in academic critical writing. Whatever the reason, we have all been in that place, facing writer’s block, experiencing frustration to express yourselves correctly, wondering how to use the most relevant information through the most appropriate choices of words. It can always seem challenging to produce quality academic work according to assignment expectations or aims of a project. Each of us have also come across difficult moments to share valid points in our writing without causing too much high similarity or even committing plagiarism.

I too, once struggled to paraphrase as a student but discovered my passion to write, each time I overcame academic challenges. The more I tried to write, the more mistakes I made, but through those mistakes I started to see the rewards of enjoying research and reading interesting topics which stimulated my critical thinking, enhanced my motivation, and primed my responsibility to share discoveries with confidence and clarity. By doing so, I felt gratitude to know that others may benefit from what I share. Once I carried on writing, making mistakes, and helping others around me as a private tutor, my academic critically writing skills developed even further at an incredible speed. It was then, I noticed, that if we face what we do not like and come out of our comfort zone, we learn and build new life-changing skills as a result.

Therefore, I say this to you now as a lecturer and module leader;

If you learn what others dread, you become aware of the rewards and confidently thrive as a professional in your field of work.

While reading this book, you eventually develop enough skills as long as you keep nurturing your talents to master those disciplines and grow as a specialist where others become grateful for your help with deep appreciation and admiration towards your work.

The message, here is to learn what others try to avoid.

Paraphrasing may not seem glamorous, but it is a valuable discipline and pays off in so many ways as an essential academic tool to help you produce good quality work. In fact, paraphrasing is misunderstood in so many ways and underestimated as merely being an academic requirement. It’s not just an academic requirement, which sometimes may seem like it’s designed to make things harder for you, but it plays a much more inspiring role to help you achieve your goals once you recognise the rewards and invest in yourself.

Here are just some of the most rewarding benefits paraphrasing has to offer, which you may have missed . . .

• Increased reading comprehension, sentence structuring, and keyword recognition.
• Opening new opportunities to develop existing theories and ideas from a fresh perspective.
• Saving time and workload when academically researching a topic.
• Helping you get your main message across confidently with clarity to a reader or audience.
• Giving you more opportunity to generate new ideas for further research.
• Increased verbal communication skills, helping you express your opinion by being exposed to a wider range of new credible academic words.
• Enhances your command of academic English, to state your findings and ideas persuasively with more authority, confidence, and evidence-based credibility.

All of this and more can be achieved by using my paraphrasing student guidebook. Apply the '7 Simple Steps' to immediately improve the quality of your academic writing or develop longer-term paraphrasing skills.

The guidebook is accommodating to different learning styles and contains valuable insights about how to paraphrase from a student's perspective who faces challenging university assignments. There are tons of helpful diagrams, examples, and multiple paraphrasing techniques that you can use to get through difficult times. The book offers different solutions on how we plan, write, and develop academic projects or assignments.

With a wide range of learning resources, you will enjoy the paraphrasing process, become more confident when faced with written challenges and be able to see that there is always a solution to produce better quality academic writing. It all depends on how much effort and determination you invest in yourself.