Paraphrasing is a signature practice of constructing intertextual discourse in academic writing. It is a story retelling technique commonly employed by academic writing classes to tackle plagiarism. However, teaching and learning of paraphrasing tend to place a very heavy emphasis on literal meanings of source messages and faithful reproductions of source meanings through new linguistic systems (e.g. altering syntactic structures, changing lexical forms, substituting synonyms), which may not effectively respond to authentic academic writing. Given this textual orientation, inferential reasoning which is essential in academic discourse tends to be relatively overlooked. To address this neglect, this article proposes an alternative pedagogical approach that exploits inferential thinking as a countermeasure to plagiarism. Specifically, it illustrates how inferential reasoning principles can be fostered and incorporated into paraphrasing instruction to assist EFL students in producing non-plagiarized academic works. In addition, it points out the kinds of knowledge students need to have when they paraphrase source texts to support their argumentation.