One of the decisions you need to make when engaging with a source is whether to quote the source’s language directly or to paraphrase it in your own words. (See Why Cite? for advice about how to make this decision.) Restating a source’s idea in your own words may not seem too difficult, but offering a paraphrase that distinguishes your voice from the source’s voice and furthers your own argument is actually rather challenging. Below are three examples of an attempt to paraphrase a passage from Daniel Dennett’s Consciousness Explained.
The first and second examples constitute plagiarism because they both blur the line between the writer’s voice and the source idea. The first alters the original without changing its form or content. The second retains long phrases verbatim from the original. Only the third example is an effective and fair paraphrase: The writer marks the boundaries between her voice and the source’s voice, and she puts the source’s idea to work in service of her own argument. Reading these examples should help you to see how to use paraphrase as an effective strategy when building an argument grounded in sources.
Below is the original passage as it appears on page 39 of Daniel Dennett’s Consciousness Explained (Boston: Little, Brown, 1991):
Almost all researchers in cognitive science, whether they consider themselves neuroscientists or psychologists or artificial intelligence researchers, tend to postpone questions about consciousness by restricting their attention to the “peripheral” and “subordinate” systems of the mind/brain, which are deemed to feed and service some dimly imagined “center” where “conscious thought” and “experience” take place. This tends to have the effect of leaving too much of the mind’s work to be done “in the center,” and this leads theorists to underestimate the “amount of understanding” that must be accomplished by the relatively peripheral systems of the brain.
For instance, theorists tend to think of perceptual systems as providing “input” to some central thinking arena, which in turn provides “control” or “direction” to some relatively peripheral systems governing bodily motion. This central arena is thought to avail itself of material held in various relatively subservient systems of memory. But the very idea that there are important theoretical divisions between such presumed subsystems as “long-term memory” and “reasoning,” (or “planning”) is more an artifact of the divide-and-conquer strategy than anything found in nature.
Most cognitive scientists, whether they are neuroscientists or psychologists or artificial intelligence researchers, tend to avoid questions about consciousness by focusing mainly on peripheral and subordinate systems of the mind/brain, which are thought to assist a mysterious center where consciousness and subjective experience happen. The effect of this is to leave too much of the mind’s work for the center, and this means that theorists understate how much understanding must be done by the outer systems of the brain (Dennett 39).
Cosmetic changes don’t cut it
The writer of this Paraphrase 1 has plagiarized from the original because she has simply replaced the words of the original with synonymous words and phrases, instead of rewriting the key ideas in her own words. She takes the structure of the original for her own, including the phrasing of the original’s sentences (the same introductory and main clause structures) and the overall movement from sentence to sentence. This kind of cosmetic changing that leaves the original intact is unacceptable.
Dennett: “Almost all researchers in cognitive science, whether they consider themselves neuroscientists or psychologists or artificial intelligence researchers, tend to postpone questions about consciousness by restricting their attention to the “peripheral” and “subordinate” systems of the mind/brain, which are deemed to feed and service some dimly imagined “center” where “conscious thought” and “experience” take place.”
Paraphrase 1: “Most cognitive scientists, whether they are neuroscientists or psychologists or artificial intelligence researchers, tend to avoid questions about consciousness by focusing mainly on peripheral and subordinate systems of the mind/brain, which are thought to assist a mysterious center where consciousness and subjective experience happen.”
The problem with cognitive science today is that researchers focus on the peripheral and subordinate systems of the mind/brain without clarifying how these are connected to the brain’s center, the place where conscious thought and experience take place. The result is that they leave too much of the mind’s work to be done in some dimly imagined “center.” This fuzziness about whether there is a control center leads them to underplay the mind’s work that must be accomplished by the relatively peripheral systems of the brain (Dennett 39).
Using un-cited language from the original to create a patchwork is plagiarism
It may be more difficult to see why Paraphrase 2 is plagiarism. After all, the writer has indicated many of Dennett’s distinctive words and phrases with quotation marks. But as shown below, the writer of Paraphrase 2 has taken phrases verbatim from the original, rearranged them somewhat, and woven them into the fabric of her own writing—without attributing them to the source. This is called “mosaic” or “patchwork” plagiarism. It does not matter that more of this phrasing is her own than was the case in Paraphrase 1; she has still borrowed significant patches of direct language from Dennett without attribution. Remember that using more than two words in a row from a source without attribution is considered plagiarism.
Dennett: “Almost all researchers in cognitive science, whether they consider themselves neuroscientists or psychologists or artificial intelligence researchers, tend to postpone questions about consciousness by restricting their attention to the “peripheral” and “subordinate” systems of the mind/brain, which are deemed to feed and service some dimly imagined “center” where “conscious thought” and “experience” take place. This tends to have the effect of leaving too much of the mind’s work to be done “in the center,” and this leads theorists to underestimate the “amount of understanding” that must be accomplished by the relatively peripheral systems of the brain.”
Paraphrase 2: The problem with cognitive science today is that researchers focus on the peripheral and subordinate systems of the mind/brain without clarifying how these are connected to the brain’s center, the place where conscious thought and experience take place. The result is that they leave too much of the mind’s work to be done in some dimly imagined “center.” This fuzziness about whether there is a control center leads them to underplay the mind’s work that must be accomplished by the relatively peripheral systems of the brain (Dennett 39).
Dennett points out that when theorists take a “divide-and conquer” strategy by focusing narrowly on a given subsystem of the brain/mind, their theoretical models implicitly assume a center of consciousness that has not been proven to exist. By leaving in place the Cartesian notion of a control center, the models may underestimate the work that these supposedly “peripheral” systems perform (39).
Dennett points out that when theorists take a “divide-and conquer” strategy by focusing narrowly on a given subsystem of the brain/mind, their theoretical models implicitly assume a center of consciousness that has not been proven to exist. By leaving in place the Cartesian notion of a control center, the models may underestimate the work that these supposedly “peripheral” systems perform (39).
If you need to stay close to the original, then quote the passage directly. It is often the case, however, that you do not need to include all the information from the original in your own essay. If you do not need all the information in the original, do a fair paraphrase that represents the essence of the original’s idea, but leaves out what is unnecessary to your own project. For example, it is unlikely that, in your own argument, you need to include the list “neuroscientists or psychologists or artificial intelligence researchers”; these titles are part of Dennett’s particular argument (he’s trying to say something about how widespread he thinks this phenomenon is in the sciences). A fair, careful paraphrase allows you to incorporate the essence of a source’s insight without also incorporating the author’s peripheral claims or comments that don’t relate to your argument.
The reader assumes that any word or phrase that is not in quotation marks represents your own thinking, unless you signal otherwise. Imagine the first faulty paraphrase above dropped into a larger paragraph from the writer’s essay and you’ll see how the reader could move from the writer’s argument right into Dennett’s idea without even knowing that a transition in voice had taken place. This is because the writer has not signaled the shift to another’s voice. The only ways to signal this are: a) to quote directly, in which case the quotation marks signal the shift; or b) to announce through a signal phrase that the subsequent idea (though paraphrased in your own words) belongs to someone else: “Dennett points out that when theorists …” Always mark the boundary between your own voice and the voice/idea of the source with such a signal phrase. You should also give the page number from which your paraphrase came, but this doesn’t absolve you of the need to represent the idea in your own words and signal the shift in voice from your own to the source’s.
Paraphrase 3 is a strong and fair paraphrase because it captures the essence of Dennett’s idea—that scientists still assume a “control center” in their research—in the writer’s own words. The sentence structure and flow from sentence to sentence is unique to the writer, rather than following the original too closely. Paraphrase 3 is also shorter than the original—another good sign, since an effective paraphrase takes the pith of the original and leaves behind secondary commentary or asides in the original source.
Paraphrase 3, through its analytical confidence, shows that the writer truly understands the original and is making use of it. Instead of replicating the wording or structure of the original passage, she has assimilated the idea into her own thinking and transformed it through that understanding. The writer of Paraphrase 3 is using her restatement of Dennett’s idea as an occasion to further her own idea about how our conventional notion of consciousness needs to change. This paraphrase is pointed in a direction—the direction of the writer’s argument. We can see this in the way that the writer has distilled the original for her own purposes. And we can also see it in the heightened language of the phrase “supposedly ‘peripheral’ systems,” the dynamic signal phrase “Dennett points out,” and in the writer’s use of her own key terms, all of which alert us to the writer’s point of view.
The writer of Paraphrase 3 introduces a term (“divide-and-conquer”) that Dennett uses earlier in the book chapter as a useful metaphor to capture the idea for the reader. And she has introduced a term of her own—“Cartesian notion of a control center”—that is informed by, but not unique to, Dennett’s discussion. A strong paraphrase uses the writer’s own key terms—key terms that have appeared earlier in the essay and will reappear after the paraphrase—to summarize the core of the source so that the reader understands how Dennett’s idea contributes to the writer’s unfolding argument. These key terms help the reader to line up the source idea alongside the other ideas the writer has already introduced into her argument. They contribute to the overall sense that the writer’s ideas are developing in relation to, not separately from, the source’s ideas.
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