to a text means to put another person's ideas and information into one’s own words.

To put it simply, paraphrasing means restating another person's ideas and information in your own words while maintaining the original meaning. It involves rewriting someone else's thoughts in a new form without changing the core message. Paraphrasing is an important skill in writing to avoid plagiarism, to clarify or simplify the original text, and to incorporate sourced information seamlessly into one's own work. It requires understanding the source material fully and then expressing those ideas in a fresh way using different sentence structures and word choices, while still conveying the same meaning.