Exercise 14: Identifying a Good Paraphrase

Taken from Writing from Sources

This passage suggests a cluster of reasons for the high incidence of violence. It is not as straightforward as it seems. Barash begins by asserting-apparently-that violent behavior is adult and mature, rather than primitive and immature. This dichotomy can be very confusing, for, as he discusses motive (sentences 4 and 5) and cites examples (sentence 6), it seems clear that violent behavior isn’t at all “adult” or “mature.” Actually, Barash is switching from his initial reference to motive (“primitive”; “immature”), to an ironic reference to the age of the offenders (“mature”; “adult”), back to a consideration of the petty motives that set people off (“relatively trivial origins”). On my first reading, I missed the switch and wondered how “murderous violence [could be] distressingly mature.” But once the two levels get sorted out-in the second sentence, mature refers to age, not behavior-the passage makes more sense. In Paragraph 2, Barash continues to toss out words that are the equivalent of “immature” and “trivial”-“caprice,” “inconsequential”-before returning to his initial description-“primitive”-and explaining that evolution has hard-wired into men the instinct to provoke, engage in, and win confrontations with their rivals, real or potential, at whatever cost. Whether, at this stage of evolution, participating in these conflicts still confers prestige might be a subject for class discussion.

#1 stumbles over that initial quirk in the text and so begins with a misreading: she doesn’t understand Barash’s distinction between motive and age, and proceeds as if he were emphasizing violence as a function of youth, not maturity. She glides right over the various categories of motive and omits all reference to the factual study that Barash cites. The third sentence makes its point quite well, but it doesn’t really correspond to Barash’s description of evolution. At the end, though, she provides a good paraphrase of the tricky point about fighting for prestige. This student expresses herself reasonably well; her problem as a paraphrase is lack of concentration on the text.

#2 also falls into the trap of misreading the false parallel between preteens and grownups. He does mention the survey, but reduces the specifics of “12 categories of motive” and “fully 37 percent of all murder” to “most murders take place for silly, unimportant reasons.” Like many students new to paraphrase, he is really trying to write a summary. The reference to “children” in his third sentence means that he is still pursuing the (false) parallel at a point when Barash has gone on to other things. #2’s use of “tragic” to convey “irony and caprice” confirms his tendency to guess at the author’s meaning. The key point about evolution is totally ignored in this paraphrase, which ends with an interesting example of projection: his emphasis on right and wrong-“it’s wrong for them to risk lives….” suggests a moral stance that certainly can’t be found in Barash. In all, this is the weakest of the three paraphrases.

#3 is an adequate paraphrase, conveying enough of Barash’s text to provide a basis for comment and analysis if it were included in a student essay. There are a few omissions. It would be a good idea to mention the name of the survey’s author. It would be an even better idea to include a reference to evolution: “ultimately survived” doesn’t quite make the point. “Dying for no good reason…” is a summarizing statement, not a paraphrase. Similarly, in the last sentence, #3 should include one last reference to fighting “for trivial reasons”; if Barash takes the trouble to reiterate his unifying theme, so should the paraphraser.

Students sometimes observe (in paraphrase as well as the summary exercises) that successful writing from sources tends to use long, complex sentences while poor work relies on short, simple sentences with few connectives. They may ask, is longer better? A paraphrase should represent the source’s complexity as completely as possible, and, usually, to convey the relationship between ideas, one needs to use dependent clauses and participial phrases. But you might point out that short sentences can also convey an author’s meaning-#3’s paraphrase attests to that-and that a “free” paraphrase doesn’t have to echo the rhythms or even the sequence of the original text.