Answering in Your Own Words: Why Copying Loses Marks
A question says: in your own words, explain why the writer felt uneasy.
Most students find the line in the passage and copy it. It looks like the right answer. It contains the right idea. And it does not show the one thing the question is testing — that you understood it.
What lifting looks like
Passage: “The silence in the corridor was unfamiliar, and it made him quicken his pace.”
Lifted answer: “The silence in the corridor was unfamiliar.”
Every word came from the passage. Nothing was understood on the page.
Three steps to transform
- Find the key words. Here: silence, unfamiliar, quicken.
- Change each one. Silence becomes no noise. Unfamiliar becomes not what he was used to. Quicken becomes walk faster.
- Rebuild the sentence. Do not just swap words in place — write it fresh.
Transformed: “He was used to hearing noise in the corridor, so hearing nothing worried him and he walked faster.”
Same meaning. Different words. Now it shows understanding.
What you may keep
You do not have to change everything. Names, places, dates and technical words stay as they are. There is no other way to say Tuesday.
What must change are the words carrying the meaning — usually the verbs and the describing words.
The habit to build
Take any comprehension you have done. Find one answer where you copied a full line. Rewrite it using the three steps.
Do that with one answer a day. It is the same skill as paraphrasing in summary writing, and it transfers straight across.
Read next
- Cohesion: The One Thing That Moves You Up a Language Band
- Tense Control: The Commonest Reason Scripts Sit at 11 or 12
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