Paraphrasing and summarizing are extremely useful writing techniques. They allow an author to use the ideas of others and even their own and present them in a unique way.
With paraphrasing, they can ensure that they are not plagiarizing anything when writing about public information. By summarizing they can ensure that anything they write is not too long for its own good.
Now we do know the benefits of these techniques, but how does one apply them? That is the part that most people have trouble with. That’s because to use these techniques, you need to have a strong grip on English. Otherwise, the techniques will not be able to showcase their full power.
If you do not have a strong command over language, then these five tips for paraphrasing and summarizing will help you quite a bit.
5 Tips for Summarizing and Paraphrasing Content
These are five tips each for summarizing and paraphrasing your upcoming blog post.
For Paraphrasing
1. Read the Content Carefully
The first common step between the two processes is reading and understanding the content that needs to be paraphrased or summarized. Of course, your objectives will be different depending on what you want to do.
When you want to paraphrase then your goal is to highlight any and all parts of the text that seem to be poorly written or are difficult to read. Of course, this is very subjective, and what one may find difficult may be easier for others. But don’t worry about it and do what feels right to you.
After you are done reading carefully, then you can move on to the next step.
2. Change Difficult Words with Synonyms
Again, this tip is quite subjective, but one can still guess if a certain word is difficult to understand or not.
Now, go over all the parts that you highlighted, and see if they have difficult words in them.
Difficult words are usually:
- Hard to spell
- Hard to pronounce
- Have multiple meanings that change according to the context
So, identify words that have such qualities and then replace them with their easier synonyms. If you do not have a thesaurus, or you simply don’t want to put too much time into paraphrasing, then you can go online for an easier solution.
An online paraphrase tool is a good solution when you want to save time and effort. Moreover, paraphrase tools are specialized in replacing words with synonyms.
So, when you want to reduce the number of difficult or repetitive words, you can use a paraphrasing tool.
3. Interconvert Active and Passive Voice
A good paraphrasing technique is to change active voice to passive and vice versa. Usually, it is not a good idea to use too much passive voice. But, when you are paraphrasing, you don’t really have a choice.
Changing the voices has a significant impact on the statements. They give off a very different feel.
You may already know that active voice emphasizes the “subject” i.e., the person doing the action. In passive voice, the emphasis is put on the “object” i.e., the thing on which the action is done.
This makes the statements feel different both with respect to wording and content, but the meaning remains the same.
4. Change the Forms of the Words
Word form changes can make a significant impact. That’s because when the word form is changed, the rest of the sentence also has to change to accommodate it properly.
Let’s take an example to elucidate this.
“You are done here; nobody will hire you in this facility anymore”
This can be changed to:
“It’s over for you; you won’t be hired in this facility anymore”
As you can see, if we just want to change “hire” to “hired” have to change the rest of the sentence accordingly. As a result, the sentence is altered significantly.
5. Proofread When Done
After you have applied the techniques of paraphrasing, you can start proofreading the modified work.
This is necessary because paraphrasing can mess with the flow of your content. That is why you need to check if the flow is okay, and that the tone does not shift too much.
If you find out that such issues are present then you need to make minor edits such as adding a few sentences in between parts or removing them.
The final product will look much better after this step.
For Summarizing
1. Read the Blog Draft Carefully
The first step in summarizing is also simply reading the material carefully. However, unlike paraphrasing, you are looking for statements that convey the main idea of the blog.
That’s why you need to go over the entire text carefully and understand what is being said. Since in this case, you are going over your own blog post, then you probably already know what the core message is.
Anyhow, for general scenarios, it helps to underline/highlight any statements that you think are important.
2. Break Down the Draft into Sections
Summarizing an entire post is a daunting task, and quite inefficient. So, a good method is to break it down into sections. Now, if the post is already divided using headings and subheadings, then you can use them as is.
If they aren’t though then you need to manually create sections. Do keep in mind that each section has to deal with only one part of the overarching topic. With everything divided into neat sections, it becomes easier to summarize them individually.
3. Extract the Core Statements of Each Section
Now that everything has been neatly divided, then it’s time to summarize each section one by one.
Of course, the method of doing this is to extract the sentence or sentences that provide the most important information. All the details that are unnecessary for conveying the idea are ignored. This is what a summary is.
So, in retrospect, you are simply summarizing each section individually. This is a great method of summarizing, but it can become a bit tedious.
That is why another solution for this is a summarizer. A summarizer is a tool that can automatically detect which sentences best encapsulate the gist of the matter and extract them.
By using a summarizing tool on each section, you can quickly create summaries of all of them.
4. Combine the Summaries of Each Section
After you have summarized each section, you need to combine them all in a coherent manner.
This combined form will be your real summary. To ensure that different points do not mesh and become indistinguishable, you should write them in bulleted list form.
The final outcome of this will be a comprehensive summary that addresses all the core aspects of your upcoming blog.
You can use this summary as your conclusion, or you can use parts of it to replace any lengthy parts of the blog.
5. Proofread
After you are done creating a summary, you should reread it to see if there are any issues with it. Summaries that are made by combining smaller summaries of subsections tend to be very abrupt and lack proper flow.
During proofreading, such issues should be very noticeable and you should edit them a little bit. The idea is to create proper transitions between the parts so that reader does not become jarred by the abruptness of the text.
Conclusion
And there you have it. Five tips each on how to paraphrase and summarize your upcoming blog post.
These tips are very easy to understand and implement. So, you can get started right away.
