| C. While looking at the source, first change the structure,
then the words. |
For example, consider the following passage from Love
and Toil (a book on motherhood in London from 1870 to 1918),
in which the author, Ellen Ross, puts forth one of her major
arguments:
Love and Toil maintains that family survival was
the mother's main charge among the large majority of London?s
population who were poor or working class; the emotional
and intellectual nurture of her child or children and even
their actual comfort were forced into the background. To
mother was to work for and organize household subsistence.
(p. 9)
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Change the structure
Begin by starting at a different place in the passage and/or
sentence(s), basing your choice on the focus of your paper.
This will lead naturally to some changes in wording. Some
places you might start in the passage above are "The
mother's main charge," "Among the . . . poor or
working class," "Working for and organizing household
subsistence," or "The emotional and intellectual
nurture." Or you could begin with one of the people the
passage is about: "Mothers," "A mother,"
"Children," "A child." Focusing on specific
people rather than abstractions will make your paraphrase
more readable.
At this stage, you might also break up long sentences, combine
short ones, expand phrases for clarity, or shorten them for
conciseness, or you might do this in an additional step. In
this process, you'll naturally eliminate some words and change
others.
Here's one of the many ways you might get started with a
paraphrase of the passage above by changing its structure.
In this case, the focus of the paper is the effect of economic
status on children at the turn of the century, so the writer
begins with children:
Children of the poor at the turn of the century received
little if any emotional or intellectual nurturing from their
mothers, whose main charge was family survival. Working
for and organizing household subsistence were what defined
mothering. Next to this, even the children's basic comfort
was forced into the background (Ross, 1995).
Now you've succeeded in changing the structure, but the passage
still contains many direct quotations, so you need to go on
to the second step.
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Change the words
Use synonyms or a phrase that expresses the same meaning.
Leave shared
language unchanged.
It's important to start by changing the structure, not the
words, but you might find that as you change the words, you
see ways to change the structure further. The final paraphrase
might look like this:
According to Ross (1993), poor children at the turn of
the century received little mothering in our sense of the
term. Mothering was defined by economic status, and among
the poor, a mother's foremost responsibility was not to
stimulate her children's minds or foster their emotional
growth but to provide food and shelter to meet the basic
requirements for physical survival. Given the magnitude
of this task, children were deprived of even the "actual
comfort" (p. 9) we expect mothers to provide today.
You may need to go through this process several times to
create a satisfactory paraphrase.
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