In Other Words

Paraphrasing and summarizing are critical skills for college students. These skills are often reviewed in writing classes because students who have the most trouble with their papers typically struggle with the following: reading the research, understanding the research, paraphrasing and summarizing the research, and turning paraphrase, summary, and analysis into structured paragraphs.

Students are often confused about the difference between paraphrase and summary. In actuality, they are pretty similar. For instance, both contain details, both do not include opinion or analysis, and both focus solely on the information contained in a text.

The difference is this: Paraphrase includes all the information in a text, but in different words and often with a different word order and sentence order. The paraphrased text is approximately the same length as the original. Summary cuts some of the information out from the original text–information that is repeated, excessive, or not needed. However, like paraphrase, summary includes key details and is not vague, overview information. Summary is also in different words than the original.

Texts like literature reviews contain a lot of paraphrase; however, most research-based writing is less information-dense than a literature review and will contain mostly summary. This is because summarized information from multiple sources is more integrated and easier to read. On the other hand, it is difficult to write a smooth-reading text that contains paraphrased information from multiple sources. Keep this in mind as you are deciding whether to paraphrase or summarize a selection of text.

For the purpose of this class, we will practice paraphrasing and summarizing to help you create chapter outlines of your reading, which is an effective strategy to help you understand and retain the information from your textbooks more fully.

A Shortcut

If you are not accustomed to rephrasing academic text in your head, summarizing and paraphrasing effectively and correctly can seem like an impossible task. In fact, many students feel so overwhelmed that instead of trying, they turn to Gen AI to help them complete their assignments. Students may even wonder why it’s important to perform a task like summary or paraphrase without the help of technology. The short answer to this question is that in order to summarize and paraphrase effectively, you must understand what you read. If you are unable to rephrase a text, it’s likely that you don’t fully understand it. Through summarizing and paraphrasing, we complete our understanding by creating a full linguistic loop throughout the many parts of our brain that are used to process and create text. Using and forming language has a profound impact on shaping our brain and refining our intelligence … so the short answer is because it makes us smarter. The intellectual and critical thinking skills we develop in exercises like this not only improve our abilities in English but also in Math and other types of tasks that don’t involve language.

In this course, we will use the Synonym Tree technique to practice summary and paraphrase.  A Synonym Tree maps the thinking steps used to paraphrase and summarize in order to simplify the higher order thinking skills required to complete the exercise. The advantage of a Synonym Tree is that it provides a structured process that should yield acceptable results if you follow the steps. Sometimes students think the Synonym Tree will take longer than doing it in their head. However, it’s faster to do it right the first time than to have to do it again. It’s also more efficient to have a strategy than to stare at your computer in despair or waste time on social media and procrastinate doing your writing assignment. Once you train your brain to think in these steps, you will be able to perform them in your head without writing them down.

“The Bonus Army” Exercise:

Read the text below, “The Bonus Army,” preparing to summarize it in your own words. In the first part of this exercise, you will use strategies to help you understand the main ideas of the text. Next, you will use strategies to capture the key details of the text in a summary, while avoiding plagiarism.

The Bonus Army

Hoover’s reaction to a major public protest sealed his legacy. In the summer of 1932, Congress debated a bill authorizing immediate payment of long-promised cash bonuses to veterans of World War I, originally scheduled to be paid out in 1945. Given the economic hardships facing the country, the bonus came to symbolize government relief for the most deserving recipients, and from across the country more than fifteen thousand unemployed veterans and their families converged on Washington, D.C. They erected a tent city across the Potomac River in Anacostia Flats, a “Hooverville” in the spirit of the camps of homeless and unemployed Americans then appearing in American cities.

Concerned with what immediate payment would do to the federal budget, Hoover opposed the bill, which was eventually voted down by the Senate. While most of the “Bonus Army” left Washington in defeat, many stayed to press their case. Hoover called the remaining veterans “insurrectionists” and ordered them to leave. When thousands failed to heed the vacation order, General Douglas MacArthur, accompanied by local police, infantry, cavalry, tanks, and a machine gun squadron, stormed the tent city and routed the Bonus Army. National media covered the disaster as troops chased down men and women, tear-gassed children, and torched the shantytown.

Hoover’s insensitivity toward suffering Americans, his unwillingness to address widespread economic problems, and his repeated platitudes about returning prosperity condemned his presidency. Hoover of course was not responsible for the Depression, not personally. But neither he nor his advisors conceived of the enormity of the crisis, a crisis his conservative ideology could neither accommodate nor address. As a result, Americans found little relief from Washington. They were on their own.

This page titled: The Bonus Army is shared under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by American YAWP (Stanford University Press) via source content that was edited to the style and standards of the LibreTexts platform.^[1]

Instructions:

Exercise 1

1. Chunk the text above.
2. Read over the text several times to make sure you understand it.
3. Summarize the entire text in 4-6 sentences.
   1. Circle the key words.
   2. Fill in the Synonym Tree Table below with the key words you circled in the sentences. Pay special attention to the repeating words, as these will express the main ideas.
   3. Use a dictionary or a thesaurus or your own ideas to fill the synonyms column for each key word.
   4. Now create your summary of the original text, using the terms in the synonym side of the chart. Connect the ideas in your own words, explaining the article in the way you understand it. Make sure to use relevant details, but shorten the number of sentences
4. Power tip: Use scientific terminology “as-is.” If there is a group of words that is too difficult to paraphrase, you can put that group of words in quotes. Often there is no way to replace key vocabulary in a paraphrase or summary. This is okay! And sometimes synonyms sound weird. Like what’s another term for “The Great Depression?” Basically, as you summarize, use synonyms when you can, reverse the order of words, flip the sentence, etc.

Synonym Tree Table Template

Exercise 2

1. After summarizing the entire text, select 3 sentences to paraphrase in 2-3 sentences.
   1. Circle the keywords.
   2. Fill in the Synonym Tree Table below with the keywords you circled in the sentences.
   3. Use a dictionary or a thesaurus or your own ideas to fill the synonyms column for each keyword.
   4. Now create your paraphrase of the original text, using the terms in the synonym side of the chart. Make sure to change the structure of the sentences by changing the order of ideas and flipping the structure.
   5. As you write your first draft of your paraphrase, do not look back at the original text. Use the information you wrote on this exercise page to help you capture the key ideas from the original text.
2. Power tip: Use scientific terminology “as-is.” If there is a group of words that is too difficult to paraphrase, you can put that group of words in quotes. Often, there is no way to replace key vocabulary in a paraphrase or summary. This is okay! And sometimes, synonyms sound weird. Like what’s another term for “The Great Depression?” Basically, as you paraphrase, use synonyms when you can, reverse the order of words, flip the sentence, etc.

Synonym Tree Table Template