Paraphrase selected points into your own words accurately, avoiding lifting from the passage

What this dot point is asking

Once you have selected the relevant points, a summary requires you to express them in your own words. This is paraphrasing: rewording each point so the meaning is unchanged but the language is yours. Summaries that lift phrases from the passage lose marks, because the task tests understanding and the ability to compress, not the ability to copy. This dot point is about paraphrasing the selected points accurately, replacing the key words while keeping the sense exact.

The answer

Why paraphrasing is required

A summary is partly a test of whether you understood the points well enough to say them yourself. Copying the passage proves only that you located the right sentences. Rewording them in your own language demonstrates genuine comprehension, which is what the marks reward. The instruction "in your own words as far as possible" is not optional polish; it is central to how the summary is assessed, and lifting is the most common reason candidates fall short.

Replace the key content words

The mistake to avoid is changing only the small, unimportant words while keeping the loaded phrase intact. If the passage says "costs had spiralled" and you write "the costs had spiralled, leading to...", you have changed nothing that matters. The words that must be reworded are the content words carrying the meaning: the important nouns, verbs and adjectives. "Spiralled" becomes "rose sharply"; "furious" becomes "very angry"; "abandoned" becomes "given up". Find your own equivalent for each meaning-carrying word.

Keep the meaning and strength exact

A paraphrase must not change the sense or weaken the force of a point. If residents were "furious", paraphrasing that as "annoyed" loses marks, because furious is much stronger than annoyed. If a plan was "abandoned", "paused" is wrong, because paused suggests it might resume. The goal is an equivalent that means precisely the same thing, with the same strength. After rewording, check your version against the original: do they make exactly the same claim? Accuracy matters as much as using your own words.

Some words can stay

"As far as possible" genuinely allows some words to remain. Proper nouns, technical terms and very common words with no natural synonym ("school", "river", "money") can be kept; forcing an awkward substitute for them can even distort the meaning. The rule applies to the content words that can be reworded, not to every word. Use judgement: change what carries the meaning and can be changed cleanly, and leave the genuinely unsubstitutable words alone.

Examples in context

Example 1. The "small words" trap in a summary. A student selects the point "the policy was scrapped because public opposition grew overwhelming" and writes, in their summary, "the policy was scrapped because the public opposition grew overwhelming, and so it ended." Almost nothing has changed: "scrapped", "public opposition", "overwhelming" are all lifted. A proper paraphrase reads "the policy was dropped because resistance from the public became too strong to ignore", where the loaded words are genuinely replaced. The marks reward this second version, because only it shows the point has been understood and re-expressed.

Example 2. Strength preserved in a paraphrase. A passage says a community was "devastated" by a factory closure. Paraphrasing this as the community was "affected" loses the point's force: devastated means severely harmed and distressed, while affected is neutral. The accurate paraphrase keeps the strength, for example "the community was badly hurt by the closure". This shows why paraphrasing in a summary is not just swapping words but matching meaning and intensity, so that the summary reports the points as forcefully as the passage made them.

Try this

Q1. Explain what "lifting" means in a summary and why it loses marks. [2 marks]

• Cue. Lifting is copying phrases or key content words from the passage instead of rewording them; it loses marks because the summary tests understanding and the ability to compress in your own words, which a copied phrase does not demonstrate.

Q2. Paraphrase this point, keeping the meaning: "Residents were delighted by the new park." [2 marks]

• Cue. Something like: "Local people were very pleased with the new park." "Residents" becomes "local people" and "delighted" becomes "very pleased", keeping the positive strength rather than weakening it to "happy enough".

Q3. Explain why you must keep the strength of a word when paraphrasing, with an example. [2 marks]

• Cue. A weaker synonym changes the meaning, so the point is no longer reported accurately; for example paraphrasing "furious" as "annoyed" understates the anger, and "devastated" as "affected" loses the severity, both of which would lose the mark.