Explain: Showing Why Your Evidence is Important
After you have made a strong claim and found evidence to support it, you'll need to complete one final task: showing how and why your evidence is important for your claim and how it answers the question. To do this, you'll often find yourself paraphrasing the quotations you used earlier.
Paraphrasing means you are taking a quotation from the passage (or another outside source!) and re-stating the information in your own words. This does not mean that you should go through a quotation and pick out each word and switch it for a synonym (a word that has the same meaning). Instead, you can follow a series of steps to accurately paraphrase a quotation so that you can explain the reasoning behind your evidence and your claim.
To paraphrase, you can try any of the following:
Click here to try paraphrasing on your own and then check your answers!
Paraphrasing means you are taking a quotation from the passage (or another outside source!) and re-stating the information in your own words. This does not mean that you should go through a quotation and pick out each word and switch it for a synonym (a word that has the same meaning). Instead, you can follow a series of steps to accurately paraphrase a quotation so that you can explain the reasoning behind your evidence and your claim.
To paraphrase, you can try any of the following:
- Read your quotation or the passage that comes before and after it, and then put your book down. Write down what you remember of the main ideas in your quotation. Chances are, you'll find yourself inserting your own words because you can't remember the quotation exactly.
- Imagine you are explaining the quotation to someone either much younger or much older than you. For a younger person, you might simplify the language in your quotation. If you were speaking to an adult, like a teacher or employer, you might elevate the language used and come up with more mature-sounding words in place of those used in the quotation.
- If you find yourself simply changing each word of the quotation and forming a sentence that seems to be the same except for a few words, try re-ordering the phrases within the sentence.
Click here to try paraphrasing on your own and then check your answers!