She begins by explaining that inserting synonyms is not paraphrasing. She then guides students in studying a passage and identifying its key words and main ideas that must be retained to paraphrase the passage. Shirley shows her students poor paraphrases of the passage for them to critique. Finally, she has them write their own paraphrase of a 50- to 100-word source passage that they themselves choose.
A student who plagiarizes is undermining his or her community's ethics, jeopardizing his or her authority, and erasing his or her identity. That student is missing an opportunity to become a better researcher and writer and is probably not learning whatever the assignment was designed to teach.