7.2 Paraphrasing, Summarizing & Original Expression

Paraphrasing, Summarizing, and Original Expression

Paraphrasing and summarizing are general academic-language skills. They support comprehension, vocabulary growth, and original writing, even though the current test no longer contains the former Integrated Writing task that required combining a reading and lecture. In the current Email and Academic Discussion tasks, the central obligation is to answer the displayed situation or discussion clearly in your own language.

Distinguish the operations

A paraphrase restates a specific idea with substantially different wording or structure while preserving its meaning, scope, and certainty. A summary compresses a larger source to its central claim and essential support. A personal response may draw on an idea from a displayed discussion, but it must contribute to the requested exchange rather than simply reproduce another participant's wording.

Mechanical synonym replacement is unsafe. Words have different collocations, register, and logical force. Replacing may cause with produces changes possibility to certainty. Replacing economic with cheap changes meaning. Preserve qualifiers, relationships, and attribution.

A reliable paraphrase process

1. Read the entire idea and state its meaning without looking.
2. Identify elements that cannot change: actor, action, relationship, condition, and degree of certainty.
3. Choose a new grammatical frame, not just new nouns.
4. Write from memory.
5. Compare against the source for accuracy and excessive verbal borrowing.

Example source: “Because the route is closed during construction, buses will stop on Pine Street.” A faithful paraphrase is “Buses are being redirected to Pine Street while construction keeps the usual route closed.” The cause, temporary condition, and new location remain intact. “Construction permanently eliminated the bus route” is not faithful.

Useful structural changes include active to passive when natural, clause to noun phrase, or reordering cause and result. Do not force a transformation that creates awkward language. Accurate plain English is better than a strained attempt to sound different.

Build a concise summary

Map the source as central point → major support → outcome or qualification. Remove examples that merely repeat a point and numbers that are not essential. Then draft without the source visible. A good summary is shorter because it selects, not because it deletes random sentences.

Check whether a reader could distinguish the author's claim from your own. During study, use attribution such as “The speaker explains …” when reporting a source. On the current Academic Discussion task, follow the prompt: state and support your own position. Mentioning another contribution can create cohesion, but it is not a universal scoring requirement.

Protect original expression

Do not memorize essays, purchase responses, or copy long phrases from practice answers. ETS task guides can assign zero to responses that do not address the task, are not in English, or otherwise provide no scorable evidence. Independent language is also more adaptable when the prompt changes.

There is no candidate-facing official rule that a fixed four-word sequence automatically causes a penalty, nor is there a published formula that discounts every repeated phrase or caps a score by overlap percentage. Avoid such invented thresholds. Use the substantive standard: communicate your own relevant response and do not present copied language as your work.

Apply the skill to current tasks

For Email, paraphrase the situation briefly so the recipient understands the context, then make the requested action explicit. Do not copy the prompt as the entire opening. For Academic Discussion, read the professor's question and other posts, decide your own position, and support it with a reason or example. You may agree or disagree, but develop the contribution rather than substituting names in a memorized paragraph.

For Reading and Listening review, summarize a passage, conversation, announcement, or talk after one exposure. Compare the summary with the source and mark omissions, distortions, and unsupported additions. This strengthens main-idea recognition even when no summary is submitted on the test.

Use a four-part quality check

Ask: Is the meaning accurate? Is the language genuinely mine? Is the grammar natural? Does the response serve the current task? Then verify qualifiers, pronouns, and attribution. Keep an error log for meaning inflation, missed conditions, unnatural synonyms, and copied structure.

The goal is not maximum difference at any cost. It is controlled re-expression: the same evidence when reporting a source, or a clearly original and supported contribution when the task asks for your view.

Delayed verification

After writing a paraphrase, leave it for several minutes and then compare it with the source as if checking someone else's work. Underline preserved claims, circle qualifiers, and mark any idea that has no source support. Next, revise for natural language without looking at the source. The delay separates meaning control from surface imitation and makes accidental additions easier to see. Use the same check on summaries: every included claim needs support, while every omitted detail should be nonessential to the central point.