Paraphrase phrases and sentences accurately in your own words, preserving meaning while avoiding lifting from the passage

What this dot point is asking

Paraphrase is the skill of recasting a writer's idea in your own words while keeping its meaning exactly. Paper 2 uses the instruction "in your own words as far as possible" to test whether you have understood an idea well enough to express it independently. The central insight is that a good paraphrase must satisfy two demands at once: it must be genuinely your own wording, not lifted phrasing, and it must be faithful to the original meaning, including every qualifier and logical link. Failing either way loses the mark.

The answer

Why "in your own words" is tested

Copying the passage's distinctive words shows only that you located the relevant sentence; it does not show that you understood the idea. Paraphrase questions exist precisely to make you demonstrate comprehension by re-expressing the meaning. This is why "lifting", reproducing the passage's content words, is penalised even when the copied sentence is correct.

Find the content words to replace

The technique is systematic. Identify the content words, the nouns, verbs and adjectives that carry the meaning, and replace them with accurate synonyms, while recasting the sentence structure. You need not replace every small word (articles, common prepositions), and some technical terms may have no good synonym. The phrase "in your own words as far as possible" acknowledges this: change the distinctive, replaceable words, not the unavoidable ones.

Preserve the meaning exactly

A paraphrase that is fluent but inaccurate is still wrong. Three meaning-killing errors are common:

• Dropping a qualifier. "Often", "may", "in part" and "only" carry real weight; losing them overstates or understates the claim.
• Reversing a relationship. Swapping cause and effect, or condition and consequence, changes the idea entirely.
• Overstating. Turning "can contribute to" into "causes" makes a claim the writer did not make.

After paraphrasing, check the new sentence against the original to confirm every relationship and qualifier has survived.

Recast structure, not just words

Strong paraphrase changes the shape of the sentence, not only individual words. If the original is "X, because Y", you might write "Y is the reason that X". Restructuring makes it genuinely your own and proves you have processed the idea rather than swapping a thesaurus's worth of synonyms into the original frame.

Examples in context

Example 1. A qualifier that must survive. A passage reads "Education can, in the right conditions, lift people out of poverty." A careless paraphrase, "education lifts people out of poverty", drops two qualifiers ("can" and "in the right conditions") and so overstates the claim into a guarantee the writer never made. A faithful version, "under the right circumstances, education has the potential to raise people out of poverty", keeps the hedged, conditional meaning, showing why checking qualifiers against the original is the decisive final step.

Example 2. Restructuring to prove understanding. Given "Cities grow unequal because opportunity clusters where capital already sits", a synonym-only attempt leaves the frame intact and reads as disguised lifting. A restructured paraphrase, "Because investment tends to concentrate in places that are already wealthy, the gap between rich and poor areas of a city widens", reorders the idea while preserving the causal link, demonstrating the genuine comprehension that the own-words instruction is designed to test.

Try this

Q1. Explain why lifting words from the passage is penalised in a paraphrase question. [2 marks]

• Cue. Copying the distinctive words shows only that you located the relevant sentence, not that you understood the idea, which is exactly what the paraphrase is meant to demonstrate.

Q2. Paraphrase: "Progress, unchecked, can outrun our capacity to manage its consequences." [2 marks]

• Cue. Something like: when advancement goes unregulated, it can move faster than our ability to deal with the effects it produces, keeping the conditional and the cause-and-effect.

Q3. Explain why dropping the word "often" can make a paraphrase inaccurate. [3 marks]

• Cue. "Often" hedges a claim to mean usually but not always; removing it converts a frequent tendency into a universal rule, so the paraphrase states something stronger and different from what the writer meant.