Paraphrasing: restate the passage without losing its meaning or source

The task is not to make borrowed information look unborrowed. This entry focuses on a short passage’s meaning, its important details, and the record of where it came from. It does not offer a formula that guarantees acceptable attribution, compliance with an assignment, or permission to reuse someone’s work.

Keep the exception, not just the general idea

Here is an invented notice written for this example: “The sketching room opens at noon on Saturdays; on the first Saturday of each month it opens at two.”

A possible restatement is: “Saturday visitors can enter the sketching room from midday, except on the month’s first Saturday, when opening is delayed until 2 p.m.” Both sentences describe the same fictional arrangement. The second sentence changes the expression without dropping the exception.

“The room opens later on weekends” would be a different statement: it loses the times and adds a claim about a broader period. “The room is always open by noon” would contradict the exception. In this example, the practical issue is fidelity to the notice, not how many individual words have been replaced.

If this were a real notice used in a report, the restatement would still need its source connected to it. Calling something a paraphrase would not make the source disappear.

A passage-and-source note

This optional working card keeps the restatement beside the details you need to check. It is not a required citation style.

Passage location: [page, section, or other usable locator]
Source details: [creator, title, date if shown, and where found]
Meaning I intend to preserve:
Details or exceptions that must remain:
My independently written restatement:
Where I may have added, softened, or broadened the meaning:
Source reference to attach in the finished work:
Unresolved question for the instructor or editor:

For the invented notice, the “details” line would include Saturday, noon, the first-Saturday exception, and two o’clock. Check the proposed restatement against the actual passage, not just your memory of its general topic. If the original is unclear, record that uncertainty instead of quietly settling it in the new wording.

Different from a summary or a citation

In this page’s example, the restatement keeps the notice’s specific arrangement. A short overview would serve a different purpose, and the source reference would serve another: identifying where the information came from. Do not ask one line to do all three jobs without checking what your task requires.

A student may want an adult to ask whether an exception survived the rewrite. That is different from asking the adult to rewrite the paragraph for them. A useful response is to point to the part that seems changed and ask what the student intended.

No automatic clearance

Changing wording alone is not a publication decision. Our fictional notice and restatement are original illustrations, not adapted Purdue exercises. For a real assignment, follow its stated requirements and ask about unclear expectations. For reuse or permission questions, this vocabulary entry does not supply a legal judgment.

Source

[1] Purdue University, Purdue OWL. Quoting, Paraphrasing, and Summarizing. No page-specific publication date shown; accessed September 6, 2026. The paraphrasing paragraph supports [1]. Source exercises and quoted material are not reproduced.

Related guides

• Summary
• Source citation
• Annotation
• Revision