Mediation and reformulation: summarising, paraphrasing and transferring meaning
This domain covers the mediation items: summarising a passage or a section in a set number of words, paraphrasing a sentence or expression, relaying information from a notice, chart or timetable into connected prose, and adapting a message for a different reader - for example turning a formal announcement into an email to a friend. What is assessed is fidelity plus reformulation: the meaning must survive, and the words must change.
Rules for a summary
- Length: typically a quarter to a third of the original. Count as you write.
- Keep: the main idea, the causal or contrastive relations, and the writer's stance and hedging.
- Cut: examples, secondary statistics, repetition, rhetorical flourishes, direct quotation.
- Rewrite: nominalise (they decided → their decision), change voice, combine two short sentences into one complex sentence.
- Never: add opinion, add information from outside the text, or lift a string of more than three or four consecutive words.
Paraphrase toolkit
Synonymy at the same register; word-class change (decide → decision); active–passive shift; clause reordering; moving from specific to general, or unpacking a definition. After rewriting, check meaning backwards: does your sentence allow only the original interpretation?
Transferring meaning safely
Preserve five things: agent (who does what to whom), polarity (negation or affirmation), quantity, time, and modal strength - may is not will, should is not must. For a chart or notice, state the trend and the key contrast, not every figure; convert symbols and abbreviations into full sentences.
Worked example
Original (about 55 words): the university library will stay open until midnight during the exam period, after a survey of 400 students found that those who studied late reported better results, although staff have asked for extra funding to cover the additional hours.
Summary: The university library will open until midnight during exams after a student survey linked late study to better results. (20 words)
The cause-effect core is kept, the survey figure of 400 is cut as secondary, the staff funding request is cut as a detail, and the reformulation uses nominalisation (a student survey) and a reduced relative clause. Note that the summary neither praises nor criticises the decision.
Traps that cost marks
- Copying whole sentences and changing one word.
- Adding evaluation: this is an excellent initiative.
- Dropping a negation or changing a quantity.
- Weakening or strengthening modality: may rewritten as will.
- Swapping the agent: the council criticised residents for residents criticised the council.
- Listing figures instead of expressing the relationship between them.