The Grammarphobe’s Guide, Research Paper Example

The act of paraphrasing is a different way that an author can take the work of another scholarly source and apply it to his or her own thoughts and analyses for legitimacy and credibility within the paper.  Paraphrasing is much different than simply including direct quotations.  A summary must be provided and proper citation in MLA or APA format should be used to give credit to the original author for his or her work.  Failure to do so can result in committing plagiarism, which is a very serious offense in the academic community with many legal and institutional disciplinary actions that can be taken.

In the first passage written by the author for our examples, the following sentence can be used for paraphrasing the author’s work: O’Conner (2003) argued that we have become brainwashed into believing that to become a good writer, we need to create literary works that are difficult and tough to read, although it is actually the opposite (p. 195).

The second passage is much longer, which makes paraphrasing slightly more difficult.  O’Conner (2003) argued that confusion within a literary work is not the fault of the reader, but rather the inability of the writer to effectively communicate the point to the reader in a manner that could easily be understood (p. 195).

Finally, the third passage makes for a very interesting paraphrase exercise.  O’Conner (2003) argued that a good writer should be able to communicate complex issues in a simple format that can not only be easily understood by the reader but communicate in a powerful way that can have a very profound impact on the reader (p. 196).

Paraphrasing is an important tool that must be understood in order to effectively communicate to an educated audience.  This tool also provides another way to share the research and ideas of other works in a manner that does not lead to a dull repetitive experience of constant direct quotations.  Paraphrasing can provide the reader another, simpler, way to read the work by other authors and understand how it actually applies to the current literary work.

References

O’Conner, P. (2003). Woe is I: The grammarphobe’s guide to better English in plain English. New York: Riverhead Books.