THE CONCEPT OF A PARAPHRASE—Critical Thinking by Larry Wright

Overview: In this chapter we develop a technique for summarizing expository passages. Writing out brief paraphrases will help you think about and demonstrate your understanding of what you read. It will also deepen that understanding. (Wright, 3)

Paraphrase: To paraphrase something is, roughly, to say the same thing in different words. (Wright, 4)

Ordinary paraphrasing such as this reveals a wide range of social and perceptual skills at work in our use of language….Hence, paraphrases will be delicately sensitive to those circumstances (in which the words occur) too. (Wright, 4-5)

Two general features of context:

The Raiders will win the Superbowl.

The Raiders will win the game.

In the first instance, ‘Raiders’ refers to the pro football team from Oakland that plays in the NFL. We effortlessly draw upon our general understanding to situate the context.

In the second instance, it is not as clear what ‘Raiders’ refers to. The Raiders could be a little league baseball team, a high school volleyball team, a professional football team, or even a college water polo team. Thus, the surrounding context of the second instance is far more important in determining the significance of ‘Raiders’ than in the first instance. We need additional information to draw upon our general understanding in this instance.

2) Context provides words with motivations.

In the previous examples, ‘Raiders’ can be motivated in different ways, i.e. what the team consists of—sport, affiliation—school, professional, etc.

Notice the example Wright provides, The Cholera passage. He provides a full-scale paraphrase—one with all of the details of the first. His purpose in doing this is to give an example of Type II Reading. You go back and forth between the two, looking for detail that needs to be included. This type of reading is intensive and does not happen with just one pass over the material. Type II reading requires detailed attention to the content of the passage and what we will be doing requires that we utilize Type II reading in all that we do.

To have a basic, yet thorough understanding, shorter paraphrases are more valuable for our purposes.

There are four jobs we want paraphrases to do:

2) To compare our reading of a passage with the reading of others who have read it.

3) To help us examine its internal structure.

4) To display our understanding of it to an instructor.

To be able to do 1-4, we need not reproduce every detail of the passage in question, but instead, we need to select the central items of substance and ignore the less important details. We will call these short summaries of essential content: Bare-Bones Paraphrases.

Shortest Possible Paraphrase—Headline

Bare-Bones Paraphrase—Headline in proper grammatical form.

Notice, we have two different concepts of paraphrase now. In the initial examples, we simply restated in different words what the sentence "I am busy" was about. However, the Cholera passage shows a second concept, summarization. Not only did we restate in different words, but we also shortened and summarized the main point. We will use both concepts of paraphrase throughout the course: restating and summarizing.

In the act of summarizing, what happened? We omitted parts of the passage. Wright refers to these omissions as padding.

For example, we left out:

1) Who the epidemiologist was and who he worked for

2) That the patient is currently recovering

3) That cholera is a public health problem in South America

4) The unknown identity of the patient

Specifically, anything we omit from the bare-bones paraphrase is padding.

Two general categories: different kinds of background (categories 1-3) and different kinds of detail to omit (categories 4-7).

1. Setting: story location, source, and so on (when these are incidental and not part of the point.

• Cholera example: setting, San Francisco, is part of the point, thus it is not padding.

2. Substantive Background: things the reader may not know about the substance of the passage that aid in understanding it or its significance.

• Cholera example: Patient is in the hospital, common in South America where sewage is a problem, and verification by laboratory tests of cholera.

3. Definition of terms: the linguistic background of words in the passage.

• Cholera example: Definition of cholera, "bacterium Vibrio cholera."

4. Dispensable Detail: the substantive details that go beyond what is needed in a bare-bones paraphrase.

• Cholera example: The things in 1-3 plus the name of the epidemiologist, etc…

5. Restatement of substance

• Cholera example: "caught the disease," "locally acquired," "San Francisco man," "an unidentified man," "health officials," and "California Dept. of Health."

6. Illustration (a variation on restatement)

7. Frills (humor, polite asides, etc.)

 "The point of these categories is simply to help you identify things to be left out of a paraphrase when the substance is not simply obvious. By guiding your eye in this way they will help you identify the parts of the passage that go into the paraphrase, eliminating other parts from consideration. Do not think of these categories as strict or absolute. Some padding will fall on the borderline between categories, and other sorts will fall easily into more than one. In such cases you will have identified padding—something to omit from the paraphrase—even though its classification will be difficult." (Wright, p. 13)

For example, I classified "bacterium Vibrio cholera" as an example of 3, whereas Wright classified it as 4. Arguably, both can be justified. However, the important thing to note is the identification of padding. From there determine if it is one of the two general types, or both, then if possible, further categorize it.

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Human Understanding and Two Principles of Paraphrasing

1. For next time read, pp. 16-29 of the Wright text.

2. Pay particular attention to the italicized words or phrases.

3. Become familiar with the following terms:

a. empathy

b. presupposition

c. implied significance

d. principle of charity

4. Things to Keep in Mind section, pp. 28-29.