How to Paraphrase in IELTS Writing Task 2
First of all we should understand what is paraphrasing? It is when we say or write anything base on the original idea but use our own words or sentence structure or by using synonyms to explain.
If you think paraphrasing is a difficult task, it’s not because you do this exercise on daily basis as if you are telling a movie story or share experience or any conversation happened with your friend or colleague you cannot say all these things in the same pattern and you do paraphrasing.
First thing you should be clear is the main idea for paraphrasing. For this read the sentence couple of times to understand what information the sentence is trying to tell you. According to that you can write sentence in your own words to make it impressive, but keep in mind that the original idea or message should be clear.
Why do you need to paraphrase?
Need of paraphrasing is in the introduction part as it is based on it. In this section we need to write the question in another form using different structure and synonyms to give essay a good start.
How to paraphrase:
– Using synonyms
– Being aware of common mistakes
– Changing sentence structure
USING SYNONYMS
Synonyms is “a word or phrase that means exactly or nearly the same as another word or phrase in the same language”
For example;
Calm/Serene/Peace/Tranquil
Cut/Chop/Slash/Slit
End/Terminate/Conclude
TIP >> While paraphrasing you don’t need to change all the words in the sentence but most of them. Be careful with the choice of the synonyms as it should depict the same meaning and should not change the sense of the sentence.
TIP >> You should practice it by rewriting the question of task 2 in your own words.
COMMON MISTAKES
Most of the students read vocabulary books to a wide range of synonyms. Well it’s not a good idea to do so as in the exam you try to inculcate heavy words without thinking about their relevancy it can make your score suffer. When it comes to paraphrasing examiner see that do you have the sense when to paraphrase and how beautifully you can do it. So if you don’t know how to use a word in the sentence you should not go with it.
CHANGING THE SENTENCE STRUCTURE/WORD ORDER
While changing the sentence structure you should be careful that you are not committing any grammatical mistake. It seems to be easy to paraphrase but it is not so you should do practice before appearing in the exam.
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