Learn How To Paraphrase Properly With The Best Online Guide

Learn How To Paraphrase Properly With The Best Online Guide Learning to Paraphrase: A Step-By-Step Guide Paraphrasing is often not taken seriously both by students and teachers, while students think it is the easiest task ever, and teachers, in turn, assume that every student knows well how to do it. There is a good reason for the professors to think so. In our daily speech, each of us paraphrases several times a day, for example, various morning or talk show conversations or phrases, friends, parents, blogs, etc. We all live and communicate. Every day we render something said earlier by one person to another person or party, and we don’t do that word for word. So, paraphrasing is a natural way for all humans to convey information. Thus, if we do it so often, it’s possible to assume everyone knows well how to do it well. However, it’s crucial for students to know how to do it in order to avoid plagiarism. Besides, mastering this skill will allow you citing someone’s ideas without a need of a word for word quotation. When you are able to paraphrase pro perly, you have a chance to make your writing diverse and show how you mastered the material. What Is Paraphrasing? Paraphrasing means to keep the meaning of the original text without copying its exact wording. Massachusetts Institute of Technology defines paraphrasing as taking the words of another source and using your own vocabulary to restate them. A paraphrase is actually swapping the keywords not to parrot the author and render his main idea at the same time. Yes, it may sound really simple, however, there are so many students having troubles with it. The problem is that when paraphrasing, they misinterpret the main idea of the original text. Linguistic scholars define full paraphrase and quasi-paraphrase. According to Bhagat Hovoy, it can cause very subtle but still very essential meaning, implication, and point of view differences. Bhagat Hovoy define paraphrasing as phrases or sentences rendering almost the same meaning through using different words. The Difference Between Paraphrasing and Plagiarism The main difference between paraphrasing and plagiarizing is very simple, correct paraphrasing usually has a source attached or cited. When citing someone else’s source you show that you do not try to produce someone’s work for your own. Ideas are really valuable in academia, so if you try to pass off someone’s idea as your own, it is perceived as stealing. And there is a good reason for that, while some academics spend much time on their studies to come up with those ideas, and stealing them is a serious offense. They might be just phrases or words for you, but those ideas are the result of someone’s hard work. When paraphrasing, you don’t only change the main words but also the sentence structure, and at the same time, you give some new life to the text. According to some experts, if a paraphrase has seven or more words from the original source and it is not acknowledged properly, it is considered to be plagiarism. It is necessary to save the meaning and intent of the original idea as much as possible, but the words and vocabulary, in general, have to be different. It is a sort of following a recipe and at the same time, substituting each ingredient by something else and getting the same dish at the end. And don’t forget to state the original author in the reference. The Difference Between Paraphrasing and Summarizing When summarizing, you can gather all the main ideas of another thinker or author in their core concepts. There is a very small difference between a summarized paragraph and a paraphrased one. A paraphrased paragraph, as a rule, is aimed to give the main idea of what it is referring to. A summarized paragraph is intended to show the main points and ideas of the initial source. Both of them must have citation and references to the original source. It is very possible to make a properly paraphrased summaries and even plagiarized summaries. A summary that is paraphrased properly should restate a written summary via new vocabulary and structure. It also requires correct in-text citation. A plagiarized summary will restate the same original summary’s ideas using many the same keywords. And it is not referred to the original author. How to Paraphrase It requires some skills and practice to paraphrase a point, argument, or idea of another person. The following tips will help you master this skill the soonest. The order of the words and sentence has to be adjusted. Before thinking of new words for your sentence, you should change the whole structure of the sentence. A new sentence should start at a different place than the original one. This way, you will have to make wording changes. For example: The meeting was rescheduled while the deputy had to go to the head office. – The deputy head to go to the head office, so the meeting was rescheduled. So, you just restructure your sentence and can start substituting the words to paraphrase your own sentence. Such restructuring impacts the tone, too, it brings freshness to the original idea. Sometimes paraphrasing allows making the ideas of an academic more understandable and readable, especially if you make the sentence structure easier. When restructuring, you are free to change the length of the sentence. You can make too long sentences shorter, and vice versa, combine few short sentences into a longer one. The writing manner of some academics requires the readers to read the sentence over again in order to understand it, so you can restructure it and make it easier and accessible to your reader. Substitute new words. This step is one of the most crucial to write a proper paraphrase. When using new vocabulary, you show your ability to understand everything that was said by the author and at the same time, choose the synonyms conveying the same meaning. Too complicated and esoteric words can be replaced with easier ones. And vice versa, too generic words can be replaced with those that express the main idea better. If you want to use some set phrases, you can still do it. If you want to refer later to the original turn of the author’s phrase, you can also keep it. If necessary, add the definition of terms. One of the best paraphrasing benefits is the opportunity to improve the original work. If the author didn’t provide any illumination, you can do it. Review the paraphrased sentence and check if you didn’t change the meaning drastically. It is crucial for paraphrasing. Sometimes, it is necessary to simplify the tone of the original expert to show your understanding of the material and ensure that you didn’t just alter the original meaning. Some synonyms may alter the original meaning of the text, so make sure to choose the proper ones. Paraphrase Example Original: â€Å"The world has a great writer in Erich Maria Remarque. He is a craftsman of unquestionably first rank, a man who can bend language to his will. Whether he writes of men or of inanimate nature, his touch is sensitive, firm, and sure.† (The New York Times, 2007). Paraphrased: Erich Maria Remarque is a great writer of the world. He is a first rank mater who is able to make the language obey his will. His touch is always sensitive, confident, and sure, no matter what he writes about. (The New York Times, 2007). How to Cite a Paraphrase MLA Format The MLA format requires to state the name of the author and the number of the page within parenthetical. For example: (Dickens, 25). However, if you mention the name of the author in the paraphrase, you have to use only the page number at the end. For example: According to Dickens, †¦(25). APA Format This format requires you to use the name of the author and the date within a parenthetical. For example: (Dickens, 1843). In case the author is cited within the paraphrase, just state the data at the end. For example: According to Dickens, †¦ (1843). Chicago Format This format requires you to use the footnotes for referring to a citation within the text. It’s necessary to state the full name of the author, the work title, the date of publishing, the year published, and the page numbers. For example: Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol, (London, 1843), 25. If you refer to the work for the second or more times, then use the abbreviation of the citation For example: Dickens, Christmas, 25. Paraphrasing Tools Fortunately, modern technologies develop fast and make students’ life even easier. Such tools help not only finds variants for their writing but also check it for various spelling and punctuation mistakes. You can also use various plagiarism checking programs to make sure your work is unique. Conclusion Anyone possesses the ability to paraphrase. It will be very helpful for you to master these skills to improve your writing abilities and make them more diverse. With the help of paraphrasing, you don’t seem to be dependent on the expertise research. The more you practice, the easier it will be for you to paraphrase.

The Runs Test for Random Sequences

The Runs Test for Random Sequences Given a sequence of data, one question that we may wonder is if the sequence occurred by chance phenomena, or if the data is not random. Randomness is hard to identify, as it is very difficult to simply look at data and determine whether or not it was produced by chance alone. One method that can be used to help determine if a sequence truly occurred by chance is called the runs test. The runs test is a test of significance or hypothesis test. The procedure for this test is based upon a run, or a sequence, of data that have a particular trait. To understand how the runs test works, we must first examine the concept of a run. Sequences of Data We will begin by looking at an example of runs. Consider the following sequence of random digits: 6 2 7 0 0 1 7 3 0 5 0 8 4 6 8 7 0 6 5 5 One way to classify these digits is to split them into two categories, either even (including the digits 0, 2, 4, 6 and 8) or odd (including the digits 1, 3, 5, 7 and 9). We will look at the sequence of random digits and denote the even numbers as E and odd numbers as O: E E O E E O O E O E E E E E O E E O O The runs are easier to see if we rewrite this so that all of the Os are together and all of the Es are together: EE O EE OO E O EEEEE O EE OO We count the number of blocks of even or odd numbers and see that there are a total of ten runs for the data. Four runs have length one, five have length two and one has length five Conditions With any test of significance, it is important to know what conditions are necessary to conduct the test. For the runs test, we will be able to classify each data value from the sample into one of two categories. We will count the total number of runs relative to the number of the number of data values that fall into each category. The test will be a two-sided test. The reason for this is that too few runs mean that there is likely not enough variation and the number of runs that would occur from a random process. Too many runs will result when a process alternates between the categories too frequently to be described by chance. Hypotheses and P-Values Every test of significance has a null and an alternative hypothesis. For the runs test, the null hypothesis is that the sequence is a random sequence. The alternative hypothesis is that the sequence of sample data is not random. Statistical software can calculate the p-value that corresponds to a particular test statistic. There are also tables that give critical numbers at a certain level of significance for the total number of runs. Runs Test Example We will work through the following example to see how the runs test works. Suppose that for an assignment a student is asked to flip a coin 16 times and note the order of heads and tails that showed up. If we end up with this data set: H T H H H T T H T T H T H T H H We may ask if the student actually did his homework, or did he cheat and write down a series of H and T that look random? The runs test can help us. The assumptions are met for the runs test as the data can be classified into two groups, as either a head or a tail. We keep going by counting the number of runs. Regrouping, we see the following: H T HHH TT H TT H T H T HH There are ten runs for our data with seven tails are nine heads. The null hypothesis is that the data is random. The alternative is that it is not random. For a level of significance of alpha equal to 0.05, we see by consulting the proper table that we reject the null hypothesis when the number of runs is either less than 4 or greater than 16. Since there are ten runs in our data, we fail to reject the null hypothesis H0. Normal Approximation The runs test is a useful tool to determine if a sequence is likely to be random or not. For a large data set, it is sometimes possible to use a normal approximation. This normal approximation requires us to use the number of elements in each category and then calculating the mean and standard deviation of the appropriate normal distribution.