7A Skills Practice: Paraphrasing

In Unit 3A, we saw how sometimes the same thing can be worded in
different ways, using synonyms and references. Sometimes though, we
need to consider the overall sense of the sentence. Take the following
sentences for example.

• ‘Smoking is forbidden.’
• ‘You can’t smoke.’
• ‘Smoking isn’t allowed.’
• ‘Don’t smoke!’

Although all of them express the same idea, they all use different
grammatical structures and different vocabulary. In fact there isn’t even one
word that appears in all the sentences!

Looking at this we can understand that the line between grammar and
vocabulary is not always clear. They work together. For this reason when we
paraphrase, we can’t always just replace words or references. We need to
keep the same meaning while changing the structure of whole phrases.