Paraphrase: "Action Writing"

First, remember what a paraphrase is.

  • Restating a sentence or sentences by an author in your own words.
  • You may make the sentence shorter or longer - that doesn't matter
  • You cannot change the writer's ideas - don't add meanings or change meanings
  • You may leave out some small ideas, but do not leave out important ideas

Teachers often ask you to paraphrase sentences.  Paraphrasing tells your teacher:

  1. Do you understand the main ideas of what you read?
  2. Do you understand the important vocabulary words you read?
  3. Do you know enough vocabulary words to explain the idea in your own, original words?

Stage 1: Understand the Reading

When we paraphrase action writing, we focus on the question: "What happened?"   Here are 3 steps to help you start.  They should remind you of our steps for summarizing!

  1. Verbs.  What are the important verbs - the main verbs of each sentence? Sometimes the verbs "be" and "seem" are not actions.  In a summary, you may not think they are important.  In a paraphrase, however, all the writer's ideas are important, so these might also be "important verbs."
  2. Nouns.  Focus on the subject of each sentence (who did the action?) and the object (what thing or person was affected?) 
  3. Connecting words or transitions.  Words that connect sentences (the FANBOYS especially) are important.  They show sentence structure.  Transitions words are important.  They show relationships between ideas.  You need both to paraphrase well.

You may want to highlight or circle these important words. This will help your understanding!

In general, we want to make the original sentence more simple. DON'T replace simple words with more difficult ones.

Stage 2: Creating a Paraphrase

As we begin, let's just look at three ways to paraphrase.

  1. Use synonyms.  Replace important verbs and nouns with verbs and nouns that have the same meaning.
      • The car raced down the road. --> The auto sped down the street.
  2. Change the word order. If a sentence has a FANBOYS we can often exchange the sentence parts:
      • The driver was laughing and the passenger was screaming.
    --> The passenger was screaming and the driver was laughing.
  3. Change the part of speech of an important noun or verb.  If you can't see a way to change word order, maybe you can do this.
      • The bear growled loudly. 
    --> Loud growls came from the bear.

With every paraphrase, try to do 2 things from this list! 
Only changing words, or only changing word order, is not enough.