Paraphrasing is not substituting synonyms. Summarising is not condensing the original sentence by sentence. Both require understanding the source deeply enough to restate its meaning in your own words and structure — and both still require a citation.
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When you use another author's work in your writing, you have three options:
Quoting — reproducing the source's exact words, enclosed in quotation marks, with a citation including the page number. Use quoting sparingly: when the exact wording matters (a legal definition, a precise technical claim, a famous formulation), when changing the words would change the meaning, or when you intend to analyse the language itself.
Paraphrasing — restating one specific idea from a source in your own words and sentence structure, with a citation. A paraphrase is typically the same length as the original passage. Use it when the idea matters but the original wording does not.
Summarising — reducing a larger argument or multiple ideas from a source to a brief statement of the main point, with a citation. A summary is shorter than the original. Use it when you need to acknowledge what a source argues without reproducing its detail.
The choice depends on why you are using the source: if the exact wording is the point, quote; if one specific idea is the point, paraphrase; if the overall argument is the point, summarise.
Patchwriting is the practice of taking a source's sentence and replacing individual words with synonyms while keeping the original sentence structure. It is the most common academic integrity problem in student writing, and it is problematic even when the source is cited.
Original (Pendlebury et al., 2019): "Concept drift — the change in the statistical distribution of malware features over time — causes classifiers trained on historical data to perform substantially worse on samples collected even months later."
Patchwriting (problematic): "Feature distribution shift — the alteration in the statistical characteristics of malware attributes over time — leads classifiers trained on past data to perform considerably worse on specimens gathered even a few months after training (Pendlebury et al., 2019)."
The structure, logic, and sequence are identical to the original. Only individual words have been substituted. This is patchwriting: it does not demonstrate understanding of the source; it demonstrates facility with a thesaurus.
Why is this an academic integrity problem? Because it gives the impression that the writer understood the source well enough to restate it, when in fact the original author's thought process is being reused under a thin veneer of word-substitution. Patchwriting also degrades with each pass — translated patchwriting often loses nuance that the original wording preserved precisely.
Proper paraphrasing involves two steps that must happen in order:
Proper paraphrase of the same Pendlebury passage: "Malware classifiers trained on historical samples lose accuracy surprisingly quickly: Pendlebury et al. (2019) measured this degradation and attributed it to distributional shift — as the malware ecosystem evolves, the feature patterns a classifier learned from older samples become less representative of new ones."
This version:
A summary condenses multiple paragraphs, a section, or an entire paper into a short statement of its main point. The steps are the same — understand first, cover the source, write from understanding — but the goal is compression rather than faithful restatement.
A summary of Pendlebury et al. (2019) as a full paper: "Pendlebury et al. (2019) demonstrated that standard evaluation methods for malware classifiers systematically overstate real-world performance because they ignore spatial and temporal bias in how datasets are split, and proposed TESSERACT as a corrected evaluation framework."
Two sentences. The main contribution is captured; the methodology detail is dropped. A reader who needs the detail will read the original; a reader who needs to know what the paper did can get it from the summary.
A paraphrase and a summary still require a citation. The citation acknowledges that the idea originated with the source's author, not with you. Omitting it — even when you have completely reworded the passage — is plagiarism, because the intellectual contribution (the idea) belongs to the original author regardless of how the words expressing it have changed.
The citation for a paraphrase or summary typically does not include a page number (page numbers are for direct quotes), but the author and year are required in APA and author-number format in IEEE.
Read the following passage and then read the student's "paraphrase." Identify what makes the student version patchwriting rather than a proper paraphrase, and write a proper paraphrase of the same passage.
Original (hypothetical): "The increasing adoption of large language models in security tooling creates a dual-use dilemma: the same model that assists a security analyst in identifying malicious code patterns can be prompted by an adversary to generate novel malware variants at scale."
Student version: "The growing use of large language models in security tools presents a dual-use problem: the identical model that helps a security researcher in recognising harmful code patterns can be instructed by an attacker to produce new malware samples at scale."
