Student Sample Paraphrase

Below are the student's first and second attempts to paraphrase the first half of the final paragraph of "Letter to President Pierce, 1855."

Original

The whites, too, shall pass--perhaps sooner than other tribes. Continue to contaminate your bed, and you will one night suffocate in your own waste. When the buffalo are all slaughtered, the wild horses all tamed, the secret corners of the forest heavy with the scent of many men, and the view of the ripe hills blotted by talking wires, where is the thicket? Gone. Where is the eagle? Gone. And what is it to say goodbye to the swift and the hunt, the end of living and the beginning of survival?

First (Unsuccessful) Attempt

Whites, too, will die off--maybe sooner than other people. If they continue to spoil their own habitat, they will smother in their own waste products. When all the wild animals are killed or tamed, when people live in every part of the wilderness, where are the wild places? They are gone. Where are the wild creatures? They are gone. How will white people react when they exchange life for survival?

This attempt at paraphrasing is not successful because it includes key words and sentence structures from the original material.

Second (Successful) Attempt

Whites are as doomed as the Indians, and perhaps they won't last as long as the Indians have because whites tend to destroy their own habitats in the course of using them. Whites are likely to eliminate all of the wildlife and wild spaces, and they will find that eliminating all that is wild means an end of life as they know it and as the Indians have known it.

This paraphrase substitutes vocabulary, rearranges sentence structure, and changes the length and order of sentences.

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