From Inquiry to Academic Writing A Practical Guide, 3rd edition

154 CHAPTER 7 | FRom SummARy To SynTHESiS

on the specialized vocabulary of their disciplines to make their arguments.

By paraphrasing, you may be helping your readers, providing a translation

of sorts for those who do not speak the language.

Consider this paragraph by George Lipsitz from his academic book

Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture, 1990),

and compare the paraphrase that follows it:

OrIGINAL PASSAGe

The transformations in behavior and collective memory fueled by the

contradictions of the nineteenth century have passed through three

major stages in the united States. The first involved the establishment and cod-

ification of commercialized leisure from the invention of the telegraph to the

1890s. The second involved the transition from Victorian to consumer- hedonist

values between 1890 and 1945. The  third and most important stage,  from

World War II to the present, involved extraordinary expansion in both the dis-

tribution of consumer purchasing power and in both the reach and scope of

electronic mass media. The dislocations of urban renewal, suburbanization,

and deindustrialization accelerated the demise of tradition in America, while

the worldwide pace of change undermined stability elsewhere. The period

from World War II to the present marks the final triumph of commercialized

leisure, and with it an augmented crisis over the loss of connection to the past.

PArAPHrASe

Historian George Lipsitz argues that Americans’ sense of the past is rooted in

cultural changes dating from the 1800s and has evolved through three stages.

In the first stage, technological innovations of the nineteenth century gave

rise to widespread commercial entertainment. In the second stage, dating from

the 1890s to about 1945, attitudes toward the consumption of goods and ser-

vices changed. Since 1945, in the third stage, increased consumer spending

and the growth of the mass media have led to a crisis in which Americans find

themselves cut off from their traditions and the memories that give meaning

to them (12).

Notice that the paraphrase is not a word-for-word translation of the origi-

nal. Instead, the writer has made choices that resulted in a slightly briefer

and more accessible restatement of Lipsitz’s thinking. (Although this para-

phrase is shorter than the original passage, a paraphrase can also be a

little longer than the original if extra words are needed to help readers

understand the original.)

Notice too that several specialized terms and phrases from the original

passage — the “codification of commercialized leisure,” “the transition from

Victorian to consumer- hedonist values,” “the dislocations of urban renewal,

suburbanization, and deindustrialization” — have disappeared. The writer

not only looked up these terms and phrases in the dictionary but also reread

the several pages that preceded the original passage to understand what Lip-

sitz meant by them.

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