Blog 7: Paraphrasing My Thoughts on Paraphrasing

Reading chapter 7 can be very helpful as far as helping people correctly paraphrase a source...well I know for me at least. Ever since high school, when I paraphrase a source or a paragraph to explain or support something, I have used my own personal strategy that I think that works for me to correctly paraphrase. First, I introduce the source so that the reader can have an idea of what I am going to say, along with where and why I am using the information provided by the source. I then give one to three sentences, depending on the longevity of the source, providing a brief summarization of the information given. Soon after this, I provide reasoning to the upbringing of the information on top of explaining the relevance of the source as it pertains to the topic of discussion. Reading chapter seven of BBG taught me to be wary of choosing my words more carefully, as I could potentially take an author’s words as my own. For example, putting too many words together similar to the original author’s is not paraphrasing correctly. Also, I can take in consideration that the audience that I am speaking to is not always exactly or similar to the audience of whom I am using a source from, so that can help me from the fear of going off track in my prompts.