## Paraphrasing and summarizing

Paraphrasing is rewriting someone else's text or ideas in your own words. This can be beneficial for the flow of your essay or thesis. You cannot write a well-written text if you copy an existing text literally or almost literally. Moreover, you develop your own train of thought by formulating it yourself. If you paraphrase well, you also indicate that you have understood the source.

Please note: without references, this is also plagiarism. So always make it clear where the original idea comes from.

Summarizing means that you summarize a section of text (for example, a number of paragraphs, pages, a chapter, or an entire book) in your own words. When you summarize, you convey the main points or conclusions from the source that are important to your story in a few words.

Whenever you paraphrase or summarize a source, you must accurately reflect the content of the source and remain consistent with the intent of the original source. This means:

- You may omit information that is not relevant to your story from a summary, as long as you do not distort the content of the original source.
- Make sure it is clear where the paraphrasing or summary begins and ends.
- For each paraphrase or summary, clearly state the source from which it originates.

An example of how to paraphrase (APA style):
Research shows that SARS-CoV-2 disseminates early in the infection period (Stein et al., 2022).