#paraphrasing activities

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Keep Your Brain In Shape with These Paraphrasing Activities

The Importance of Paraphrasing Activities

Paraphrasing is a crucial academic and workplace skill. It’s important for you to learn how you can rephrase sentences and passages, as it will make you a better communicator. It can increase your creativity, too. These are all skills which will make you valuable in the workplace and bring you a better understanding of how an argument works.

But how can you learn to paraphrase? You probably do it already – after all, you’ve probably quoted something without remembering the exact words. The key is to tap into that knowledge with fun activities and exercises.

Paraphrasing vs summarizing: what to choose? Find out now!

How Practicing Paraphrasing Can Help

It takes practice to excel at anything, including paraphrasing. You’ll need to exercise your techniques to truly grasp them. Doing fun paraphrasing games and activities can help you practice paraphrasing in a low-stress environment. This is important for developing your skills. It’s also more interesting than simply picking a sentence and rephrasing it. Keeping things interesting and challenging keeps your focus high and helps you work to a more effective level.

image credit: sciencemag.org

Since many paraphrasing activities are all-ages, you can also adapt them for use with kids or older students as well as yourself! It’s easy to catch the interest of a student when you have exciting activities that are more engaging than just sitting and rephrasing sentences.

Helpful Paraphrasing Exercises

These exercises are all interesting, adaptable, and fun if done the right way. Use any of them or combine them to create something new!

The Important Thing: Choose a paragraph. Pick the three most important points in the paragraph, and then rephrase them so that they come together nicely as if they were made to be together. This helps you practice joining together bits that weren’t originally smooth.

$2 Paraphrase: With each word worth ten cents, create a twenty-word paraphrase of a given sentence or paragraph. You can alter the amounts and what each word is worth to change up the challenge. However, working within constraints this way will help you change things in a way you might not have considered before.

Pick and Choose: Create, or have someone create, a multiple-choice list of rephrased sentences corresponding to a single original sentence. You or your students will pick the best one, the one which most closely matches the original meaning. This is a great activity for beginners because it teaches them the basics of picking up on similar meanings without making them create their own sentences yet.

Five Ways: Rephrase a single sentence five ways. Don’t put too much pressure on yourself to make each one totally unique, but try to change multiple things each time and make them sound at least a little bit different. This helps you investigate the different ways that you can change any sentence.

Challenge words: Pick a few words – or get them from a random word generator! – and try to create a rephrase that uses one or two of them. Working them in could be challenge and might sound silly, but the point isn’t to create a really great paraphrase, the point is to get you thinking differently. This will stretch your creativity and get you re-imagining the ways you can rephrase.

Changing Viewpoints: Rephrase each sentence as if you were a person telling a story about the passage you’ve read. The viewpoint from which you tell this rephrase should be any one that isn’t the viewpoint used in the passage itself. For instance, if you’re paraphrasing a story with a main character who rides a horse, write from the horse’s point of view!

Sentence Starters: Get some common sentence starters and practice paraphrasing using those starters. These can be academic or just silly. Having fun while you practice is a great way to keep yourself engaged.

Text Message: Write each sentence in a given passage as if it were a text message. Change formal structures to informal ones, fancy words to simple ones, and use text speak liberally. This won’t produce something you could use in a paper, but you’ll get a feel for how you can change the structure of a sentence.

Practice Your Paraphrasing

When you get right down to it, it’s impossible to be good at anything without a lot of practice. However, it can also be difficult to excel without help. If you’re still having trouble learning how to paraphrase, even after trying these activities, there’s no shame in seeking out assistance. Feel free to speak to a friend, teacher, or even one of our helpful employees. Sometimes even a little tidbit of advice can set you on the path to greatness. Our paraphrasing service UK is also here to help you out at any time.