How to Paraphrase Properly

A practical guide for students · Last updated 7 October 2026

Most students think paraphrasing means taking a sentence and swapping out a few words for synonyms. It's one of the most common academic writing mistakes, and it isn't actually paraphrasing at all. Universities call this "patchwriting," and it's treated the same as copying, even though every individual word has technically changed.

What patchwriting actually looks like

Original source

"Social media use among adolescents has increased dramatically over the past decade, raising concerns among researchers about its impact on mental health."

Patchwriting, not real paraphrasing

Social media usage among teenagers has grown significantly over the last ten years, causing worry among scientists about its effect on psychological wellbeing.

Notice the sentence structure is identical, same clauses, same order, same shape. Only individual words changed. A marker, and most plagiarism-detection software, will flag this as too close to the original, citation or not.

What real paraphrasing looks like

Genuine paraphrase

Researchers have grown increasingly concerned about the mental health effects of social media, largely because adolescent use of these platforms has risen so sharply in recent years.

The idea is the same. The structure isn't. The cause and the concern have been reordered, the sentence doesn't follow the original's shape at all, and it genuinely reads as something written by a different person processing the same information.

A method that actually works

Read the passage, then close it. Don't paraphrase with the original text visible on screen, that's exactly how patchwriting happens, even unintentionally.
Write what you understood, from memory, in your own words. Without the original in front of you, you genuinely can't copy its structure even if you tried.
Check your version against the original. Confirm you haven't misrepresented the point, and that you haven't accidentally reused a distinctive phrase.
Cite it anyway. This is the part students most often get wrong: paraphrasing doesn't remove the need for a citation. The wording is yours; the idea still came from somewhere else, and that's what a citation actually credits.

When to quote instead of paraphrase

Not everything should be paraphrased. Direct quotation is the better choice when:

The exact wording matters, a legal definition, a precise statistic, or a particularly significant phrase from a primary source.
Paraphrasing would actually weaken the point, some original phrasing is simply more precise than any rewording would be.
You're analysing the language itself, as is common in literature or linguistics, where the exact words are the subject of discussion.

Outside of those cases, paraphrasing is usually the stronger choice. It shows a marker you've genuinely understood the source well enough to restate it, not just copied it.

This connects directly to what LitMark's Citation Audit checks for: it doesn't just confirm a citation is genuine, it checks whether the claim attached to it actually matches what the source says, catching exactly the kind of accidental misrepresentation that can creep in during a rushed paraphrase.

The honest takeaway: paraphrasing isn't a word-replacement exercise, it's a comprehension exercise. If you can't explain a source's point without looking at it, you're not ready to paraphrase it yet, and that's worth knowing before you write, not after a marker flags it.

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