Other than my online SAT class, the only true reading genius has to be Erica.

Her book, The Critical Reader, is my de facto recommendation when it comes to learning how to systematically paraphrase text. She is fantastic. Now get into this lesson!

It’s a matter of understanding what you are reading. The do that, you must paraphrase.

Paraphrasing Strategy

The core of paraphrasing is not acting like a thesaurus, but proving that you understand the sentence that is put in front of you.

There are two main steps that you will need to paraphrase a sentence successfully. The first is to analyze what you read. The second is to re-write the sentence in your own words.

Analyze What You’ve Read

As previously mentioned, in order to start analyzing what you’ve read, you need to break down a sentence into the sum of its parts. What are the parts?

• Subjects/Clauses that act as subjects
• Verbs
• Objects/Clauses being acted upon by verbs
  • Identifying any “SAT words” that are used

Using your pencil, you can easily use brackets to separate and label the subjects and objects of the sentence. You can then underline the verbs once you identify them.

If you know with certainty what all of the individual words in the sentence mean, then you ask yourself a few questions. Ask yourself, what is the verb doing to the subjects and objects? Is it a positive or a negative action? What is the result of the action (if any?).

These are all important questions to ask yourself in order to understand what is going on in the sentence.

If you do not definitively know all the words in the sentence, you need to ask yourself slightly different questions. Once you figure out what is going on in the rest of the sentence, identify those “SAT words” that are used.

If you do not know what the entire word means, perhaps there is a root that is familiar to you. When you remember the root of the word, you may be able to have an idea of what the word is doing to the sentence.

Is it changing a subject? Is it changing an object? Is it acting on a subject or object in a positive or negative way? Once you have answered all of these questions, you should be able to understand what the sentence means.

Once you understand what it means, it shouldn’t be a far stretch to figure out what the sentence does not mean. You should try and think of an antonym that would make the sentence mean the opposite of what you believe the sentence means. When you have done that, you should have a solid understanding of what you are reading.

Re-Write in Your Own Words

Now that you have understood the sentence in question, you need to re-write the sentence in your own way. This will likely involve changing word order (syntax), as well as word choice.

The syntax should be the easiest part to change, as English has a very strict word order. English’s word order is “subject-verb-object” or SVO. For a comparison, Spanish’s word order is “verb-subject-object” or VSO, though sometimes SVO is found in Spanish.

Therefore, the syntax of your newly constructed sentence is likely to not vary too much from the original (however in many cases, clauses can be moved about in certain ways).

Word choice is where you have the chance to really show you can paraphrase a sentence, but it cannot be done without the initial comprehension. Using your extensive vocabulary (which you likely have worked very hard to obtain) you can use a variety of synonyms in order to make the sentence mean the same thing as it did before you re-wrote it.

It is important to only change the words that actually bring the sentence meaning. Changing less important words will not help you paraphrase the sentence. For example, changing the word ‘student’ to ‘pupil’ is not going to be helpful to you.

While it is true that some words have slightly different meanings, if you stick relatively close to the original word semantically, you would have succeeded in paraphrasing a sentence.

Paraphrase Example

Original sentence:

While the student perused a comic book during class, the professor contemplated failing him.

Subjects

[student – 1^st clause] [professor – 2^nd clause]

Objects

[comic book – 1^st clause] [failing him – 2^nd clausal object of ‘contemplate’]

Verbs

[perused – 1^st clause] [contemplated – 2^nd clause]

SAT words

[peruse] [contemplate]

Possible suggestions for word change

Peruse – (to study, to examine, to browse)

Contemplate – (to think about, to consider)

Possible new sentences:

a)     Since the student browsed a comic book during class, the professor considered failing him.

Good! But we can do better.

b)     The professor considered failing the student because he browsed a comic book during class.

As you can see from the example, the sentence was broken down to its parts and the meaning was extracted. Using some of the new possible word choices that were available, the new sentences reflect the original meaning of the sentence, but were re-written in a slightly different way.

Sentence ‘A’ merely substituted new words for the previous ones. Sentence ‘B’ substituted the new words as well as played around a little bit with the syntax of the sentence. Both results yield grammatical sentences that preserve the meaning of the original sentence.

It might take a little bit of practice (and learning a lot more words) but paraphrasing sentences does not have to be difficult. As long as you truly understand a sentence, re-writing it should be painless.

And that’s the key, really. If you want the right answer on the SAT, you are going to have to understand. But the correct answer is almost NEVER just the sentence. Often, the right answer on a SAT RC question is a paraphrasing of the original sentence from within the essay.

We are not simply finding meanings, we are finding right answers & getting higher scores.

Happy Paraphrasing! (Or should I say, Happy Re-Writing!)

Additional Resources

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ZzDow20kw0

https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/619/2/

Do you have any sentences or paragraphs that you just cannot understand? Let’s discuss.

Throughout this blog it will be essential for you to take the information, study it, and practice it. If you are not practicing on real SAT exams, you won’t be able to see improvement. What’s the point of learning, either by yourself or with a tutor, if you are not practicing what you are learning?

Direct Hits Vocabulary

Claire Griffith manages and administrates all the Direct Hits PSAT, SAT, and ACT courses. As part of the process, Claire counsels students and their parents on the best approaches to the tests and ensures that classes meet student and parent expectations. Based on her experience with how students best learn, Claire guides the Direct Hits team in revising and improving the Direct Hits Core and Toughest Vocabulary books.

Today, Claire shares the best way to use her books, Direct Hits, to increase your vocabulary. She also discusses some excellent pieces of advice all students & parents should follow to do well on the test.

More specifically, in this interview we discuss:

• Why you should attempt to learn vocabulary.
• The single best way to learn vocabulary.
• How to use the Direct Hits series of books.
• The best way to improve your SAT score.

Items mentioned in this interview:

• Direct Hits twitter account
• Direct Hits website
• Direct Hits – Core Vocabulary
• Direct Hits – Tough Vocabulary

Thank you for checking out this expert interview. Claire was a great guest. This was such a fun interview, and I learned a ton. I hope you also learned a lot. If you want to pick up Claire’s books, don’t hesitate to click the links above.

If you have questions for me or for Claire, don’t hesitate to leave a comment or find us on twitter. I look forward to helping you.

A strong vocabulary on your SAT is pretty much a requirement. Even though the SAT will get rid of sentence completion questions in 2016, a strong vocabulary is essential for math, logic, and reading comprehension.

Today, I am including a 30-minute vocabulary lesson from the online SAT class.

Vocabulary Overview

Over the last few years I have met with dozens of tutors and hundreds of teachers. It is well established that SAT reading is the hardest section of the test to teach. Reading comprehension requires background skills that are not as easily taught as math or grammar.

While I will develop excellent posts to teach reading, and while my online SAT class is fantastic for vocabulary, reading, math, and writing strategy, if you require more reading help, you should consider buying a book or hiring a tutor. The reading best book (and possible tutor) is by Erica Meltzer. It’s called The Critical Reader.

Eventually, I’ll put together a review, but know that Erica and I talk in the podcast and I could not be more impressed. If you cannot get past the reading on your own or after watching my free videos, you should consider getting her book. If you can study on your own, it’s way better than a private tutor.

The purpose of this lesson is to give you a vocabulary strategy that you can implement to truly link word meaning with word use. I constantly receive emails or comments from students complaining that it is “impossible” to learn 1000 words. Other students ask how many words they should learn to do well.

The problem that I find (and that I’m sure many other tutors find) is that those questions ignore very serious assumptions. The first assumption is that vocabulary is a tool to do well on the SAT. That’s false. The reason we learn vocabulary is so we can use vocabulary. The second assumption is that there is a “certain number” of words to know to automatically do well. That is just not the case. Never stop learning new words. Today I will teach you how to learn vocabulary for everyday use.