PhD students tend to face extra pressure to write their literature review correctly in thesis or journal without plagiarising. It is difficult enough to find appropriate and confident sources through reading and interpreting the material and choosing important quotations or information to support your findings or argumentation. If not done properly, this could lead to plagiarism.
To prevent plagiarism, you must not only write your literature review properly with the suitable style manual such as APA or Harvard, but also properly manage direct quotations and paraphrasing. Paraphrasing is acceptable if you rephrase the ideas using your own words and add citations. Paraphrasing is not acceptable if you simply copy and paste original text of literature review and alter them slightly.
Perhaps you understand all this. You could nevertheless ask, “How to paraphrase literature review correctly without plagiarise?” To many PhD students, it is daunting to learn how to paraphrase literature review. That’s why we wrote this article: 4 tips on how to paraphrase literature review to help you.
1) Reconstruct Sentence Structures
The word count of sentences after paraphrasing tend to be the same with original sentences. You may reconstruct sentences to make your literature review more unique than original sources. For instance, one long sentence can be separated into a few short sentences.
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2) Use Active and Passive Voice
One of the easier ways to paraphrase the literature review is to use active or passive voice. The active voice of an original sentence can be changed to a passive voice or vice versa.
3) Use Synonyms Actively
You can change the original text wording by words you understand or known as a synonym. If you are using Microsoft Word, you can simply highlight a phrase, right click and select “Synonyms” option. You can choose a suitable phrase from the list to replace an original phrase.
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4) Alter Sentences Sequence
The last part of the original sentence can be paraphrased and put as the first sentence in your literature review. This can prevent yourself from writing a similar flow with the original source.
Over To You
In short, paraphrase does not just swap few phrases only as far as look different from the original source. You can use the as-mentioned 4 tips on how to paraphrase literature review to help you write a good content without plagiarising.
You can find a proofreading and editing service, such as EdiThumbs, if you need assistance for your thesis or journal publication. We do offer paraphrasing service as well to achieve your required similarity index.
