Paraphrasing for IELTS: what Lexical Resource actually rewards at band 7

Somewhere in IELTS folklore, "paraphrase the question" became "replace every word with a thesaurus entry", and examiners now read hundreds of essays that open with "In the contemporary epoch, myriad individuals contemplate…" — a sentence no fluent writer has ever produced. The Lexical Resource descriptors reward something narrower and more useful than synonym display: at band 7, vocabulary that allows flexibility and precision, with some skilled use of less common items, and at band 6, tolerance for errors only when word choice doesn't obscure meaning. A wrong "synonym" fails both tests at once: it is imprecise and an error.

Why synonym-swapping backfires

English synonyms are almost never substitutable one-for-one. Children and offspring refer to the same people, but "parents should spend time with their offspring" is a biology textbook, not an essay. Big and considerable overlap, but "a considerable house" is wrong while "a considerable increase" is right — collocation, register and grammatical pattern all travel with the word. Every forced swap risks all three, and the risk buys nothing: examiners award nothing for avoiding repetition of ordinary words. Rarity itself earns nothing either — why big words do not raise your Lexical Resource band takes that companion myth apart.

Repeat freely: topic words with no natural equivalent (education, government, environment, children, technology). Band 9 answers repeat them without embarrassment.

Vary deliberately: evaluative and relational language, where English is genuinely rich — important → central, decisive, far-reaching; problem → drawback, cost, side-effect; shows → suggests, reflects, points to.

The three moves that actually paraphrase

1. Change the word class. The most reliable move in the language, because it forces a real rewrite instead of a swap: Tourism has grown quickly → the rapid growth of tourism; people who live in cities → urban residents; it is difficult to → one difficulty is. Question: "Some people believe unpaid community work should be compulsory for teenagers" → "making unpaid community work a requirement for teenagers". Nothing exotic happened, and the sentence is genuinely yours.

2. Change the perspective. Say the same fact from the other end: The government should fund the arts → the arts deserve public funding; young people are addicted to phones → phones absorb far more of young people's attention than…. Perspective shifts produce the "flexibility" the band 7 descriptor names, and they cannot be done mechanically — which is exactly why they read as skill.

3. Unpack or compress. Replace a word with its definition, or a clause with a nominal: obesity → the rise in diet-related health problems; people disagree about whether this is fair → the fairness of this is disputed. Unpacking is also the honest escape when you cannot recall a precise word under pressure — defining your way around a gap is itself credited as a communication strategy, where an invented word is only an error.

Where each skill is graded on this

Writing Task 2: the introduction is the showcase — the examiner reads your version of the prompt against the original before anything else. One class-change plus one perspective shift is a complete introduction paraphrase. In the body, precision beats variety: the difference between pollution and emissions, salary and income, in the right places, is the "precision" the descriptor names. How this criterion sits beside the other three is in what band 7 actually requires, criterion by criterion.

Task 1: the first sentence rewrites the prompt (The chart shows → The bar chart compares…) and the axis labels get one good alternative each, reused as needed — data language is expected to repeat.

Speaking: paraphrase is scored live as a repair skill. The band descriptors explicitly credit paraphrase as a strategy — "I can't remember the word — the machine that measures earthquakes" is a band 7 moment, not a failure — the repair moves worth drilling treats this in depth. What reads badly is the rehearsed swap: answering "Do you like cooking?" with "I adore culinary activities" signals memorisation, which examiners discount.

A drill that builds it

Take five Task 2 questions. For each, write three openings: one changing word classes only, one shifting perspective only, one unpacking a key term. Fifteen sentences, maybe 40 minutes. Then check every less-common word you used against one question — have I seen this exact word in this exact company before? If not, it goes. What survives is your real active vocabulary, which is the only vocabulary that scores.

Band 7 Lexical Resource is not owning rare words; it is never being trapped by the ones you have. The three moves are how you stop being trapped.