Reading comprehension is an important skill and not just in subjects and classes like English.
While being able to understand the written word will certainly help in any language class, since language (especially in its written form) is how we mostly convey meaning in many academic situations, reading comprehension is essential for every subject.
Whether it's boosting your vocabulary, increasing your reading, or paraphrasing, there are lots of ways you can work on improving your reading comprehension. In this article, we'll be focusing on the latter.
What Is Paraphrasing?
Put simply, paraphrasing is taking language and putting it into your own words while retaining the original meaning.
There are many ways to say the same thing and paraphrasing is a useful tool for testing your understanding of a text, providing yourself with a writing challenge, or altering a text to fit a different audience.
You can use paraphrasing to emphasize certain parts of a text or incorporate somebody else's ideas into your writing.
Paraphrasing is useful in several different contexts, but today, we're focusing simply on how paraphrasing can be used to improve your reading comprehension.
How Can Paraphrasing Help with Reading Comprehension?
Reading comprehension is a highly undervalued skill and paraphrasing can help you improve it. We've already alluded to how useful it is in a variety of academic settings, but it's a difficult skill to work on.
Reading can help you improve reading comprehension, but the results can vary wildly according to what you read and whether or not you test your comprehension when you do.
In addition to active reading and working on your vocabulary, paraphrasing is one of the best ways to work on your reading comprehension skills.
Here's how.
Helps with Analysing the Text
Paraphrasing forces you to analyse the text. You can no longer simply passively read a text or even skim it.
To effectively paraphrase, you need to have analysed the text with more rigour than you would usually.
You need to look at the main ideas, arguments, and details within the text and work out what you can keep and what you can get rid of.
Boosts Your Vocabulary
Paraphrasing will naturally boost your vocabulary. To say something in “your own words”, you need to use words that weren't in the original text.
This doesn't mean that you simply run the entire text through a thesaurus, but you will need to be aware of synonyms that maintain the original meaning of the words, which means you'll need to have a decent vocabulary.
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If you don't have a good vocabulary, paraphrasing will force you to work on it.
Increases Focus on Understanding
Paraphrasing also forces you to intimately understand the source text. You can't paraphrase if you haven't understood the text.
While you'll likely understand the text when you read it, you won't understand a text until you have to paraphrase it.
Gives Your Brain a Workout
If all of this sounds mentally taxing, it's because it is. Paraphrasing is an excellent activity for the mind, and you'll feel just how tiring it is if you have to do a lot of it.
This workout is good for your brain, though. By regularly paraphrasing and working on your understanding, you'll improve your memory and cognitive abilities, which will ultimately improve your reading comprehension.
Helps You Actively Read
Paraphrasing helps your reading comprehension because you have to read actively to do it. Active reading isn't just paraphrasing, but it's part of it.
Active reading also comes with a lot of benefits, and the skills required to do it overlap with a lot of techniques used in paraphrasing texts.
Works on Writing Skills
Paraphrasing is both a reading and a writing exercise. After all, once you've fully understood the text by reading it, you have to write it in your own words.
How Can You Paraphrase?
Now that you know how paraphrasing helps reading comprehension, how can you do it?
Paraphrasing is much easier said than done, but here are the main steps involved and some tips on how to get started.
Read the Text
You can't paraphrase a text if you haven't read it. The very first thing you should do before paraphrasing a text is to read it.
You can't simply passively read content, though. To paraphrase it, you need to actively read the text.
This means that you should take notes, highlight key points, and take the time to intimately understand what's being said.
Don't attempt to paraphrase anything until you've actively read the text, taken notes, and fully understood it.
Effective Highlighting
It can be very easy to just run a highlighter over a text and think that means you've understood it or actively read it.
When you highlight text, use different colours for different purposes.
You could choose one colour for vocabulary and words you want to look up before reading the text again.
Choose another colour for key information that you can't omit when paraphrasing and a different color for parts of the text that require further reading.
Once you've highlighted parts of the text, done some further reading, and researched your new vocabulary, you can read your text again.
Establish the Main Ideas
The main ideas of the text are the ones that you definitely need to include when you paraphrase.
You should outline these while reading the text. You might not get these the first time you read, but as you read and reread the text actively, highlight key information, and take notes, you'll start to see the main ideas emerging.
From there, make sure that any subsequent paraphrasing includes these.
Use Synonyms to Show Comprehension
One way to paraphrase while also improving your vocabulary and reading comprehension is by using synonyms.
Rather than simply looking up synonyms in a thesaurus, it's probably better for you to do this from memory when you can.
When you do this, you essentially rephrase the text and generate a version of it with a similar structure by rewording the individual sentences and paragraphs.
However, it's okay to use a thesaurus initially or if you had to look up some of the words when you first read the text.
Convey the Same Information Using a Different Structure
While using synonyms will allow you to retain the original text's structure when paraphrasing, you can also paraphrase and change the structure.
If you feel the ideas can be presented in a different order using a different logical structure, you can.
Try to ensure, however, that if the structure of the original text provided the text with meaning, then you can't change too much of it.
Combine Similar Information
In some cases, paraphrasing allows you to combine similar information or repetitions.
Some writing may use repetition for emphasis, but if you don't want to emphasize this information as much or feel that the point can be made without repetition or using several similar ideas, you can combine similar or repeated information.
Ensure Accuracy Is Maintained
Once you've finished paraphrasing, make sure that your text lines up with the original in terms of the key information and main ideas that you outlined when you actively read the text.
You can make this simpler by creating a checklist of the points and ideas that your paraphrasing needs to hit.
Another way to check that you've effectively paraphrased is by running your own paraphrased text through online tools for plagiarism.
If you've managed to maintain all the key information you highlighted while also making the text linguistically distinct enough to pass an online plagiarism test, you've likely produced a quality example of paraphrasing.
Practice Makes Perfect
Paraphrasing is a great way to practice writing, but it's not necessarily the easiest thing to do. Paraphrasing will take practice, and as they say, “practice makes perfect”.
Don't worry if your first paraphrased texts aren't great, are too similar to the original, or miss some of the key points, you'll get better at it the more you do it.
Academically Paraphrasing
To be clear, the paraphrasing that we've spoken about here is an exercise in developing better reading comprehension and writing skills.
In academia, paraphrasing comes with its own set of rules, which can include citing the original author, demonstrating understanding, and supporting an argument in an academic essay or test.
Academic paraphrasing doesn't include summarising information, either, and how it's used is stricter than some of the examples we've given here.
If you need help with academic and non-academic paraphrasing, reading comprehension, or writing, you can always reach out to a private tutor.
There are plenty of talented and experienced tutors on Superprof! With so many tutors offering the first session for free, you can always try a few out before deciding which one is right for you and the skills you're trying to develop.
Search for an ESOL tutor on Superprof today!
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