The advice students hear most about paraphrasing is “put it in your own words.” Fine starting point. Also misleading. “Your own words” makes the task sound like translation: swap out the vocabulary, rearrange the sentence structure, done. Paraphrasing is a thinking problem first.
Patchwriting keeps much of the original sentence structure and substitutes synonyms for important words. The wording changes, but the sentence still follows the source closely and may remain plagiarism even with a citation. The writer has not yet worked through the idea.
Before paraphrasing, I ask students why the source is there. What claim does it support? Which part matters for the argument? The answer affects how they restate it.
A source used for historical context gets paraphrased differently from the same source used to complicate a theoretical assumption. The variation shows that the writer understands the source’s function.
Weak paraphrasing often means the writer does not yet know why the source matters. This is one place where Writing is the thinking becomes fairly literal.