The terms Paraphrasing Tool and summarizing often confuse students of English. This is not surprising since the two mean very similar things with just a slight difference. First off, what are paraphrasing and summarizing?
Paraphrasing and summarizing are both indispensable writing tools. They are both techniques of incorporating other writers’ works or ideas into your writing using your own words. Although a writer must always use his/her own ideas when writing, sometimes it becomes necessary to use other writers’ thoughts and concepts. This may be due to one or more of the following reasons:
- To provide support to your own ideas
- To give reasons of why you agree or disagree with something
- To give depth to your writing
- To refer to something that led to your ideas
- To give a point of view which is different from yours
These same reasons for paraphrasing and summarizing are the cause of the confusion between the two. So what is the difference then?
Paraphrasing is re-writing another writer’s words or ideas in your own words without altering the meaning. The paraphrase is about the same length as the original since the purpose is to rephrase without leaving out anything, and not to shorten. Summarizing, on the other hand, is putting down the main ideas of someone else’s work in your own words. A summary is always shorter than the original since the idea is to include only the main points of the original work and to leave out the irrelevant. A summary is usually about one-third the size of the original.