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What is paraphrasing?
It’s basically rewording your sentences using synonyms, and other different words and expressions.
Sounds easy, but what’s so hard about it?
IT’S NOT EASY. Why? You might have to paraphrase multiple times in your essay. You might know a lot of synonyms, but you have to use them properly, otherwise your sentences will get too complicated and confusing. It might just not make any sense.
Let’s practice paraphrasing with the following sentence:
Junk food is bad for our body.
Let’s look at some synonyms first:
“Junk food” can be replaced by “convenience food, unhealthy snacks, sugary and salty products…”
“Bad” can be replaced by “harmful, unhealthy, damaging, detrimental, negatively affect…”
“Body” can be replaced by “health, us,…“
If you mix and match, you can come up with these following sentences:
(1) Convenience food is harmful to our health.
(2) Unhealthy snacks are damaging to our body.
(3) Sugary and salty products negatively affect our health.(4) Convenience food is unhealthy.
(5) Unhealthy snacks are detrimental to us.
If you really, REALLY run out of ideas and synonyms, you can try to make active sentences into passives, and vice versa. Another way is to change the forms of words, like changing verbs into gerunds or nouns.
Constantly practice paraphrasing on a regular basis to help you write better and faster on the day of the test! 🙂