Tips & Tricks to help you paraphrase Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar Paraphrasing Tips & Tricks to help you paraphrase Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar

What is Paraphrasing? Presenting someone else’s ideas in your own words, phrases, and sentence structure. One sentence from the source becomes one sentence in your own words. Plagiarism = 3 or more of the same words in the same order, or using the same sentence structure as the source.

Paraphrasing Tips! Read carefully, pausing at natural places such as commas and periods. Use context clues, footnotes, and a dictionary to help you reason out the meanings of unfamiliar words and phrases. Think about the text’s meaning, sentence by sentence, line by line. Explain figures of speech in your own words. Put sentences in standard subject-verb-complement order. Write your paraphrase in prose, not poetry.

Below is a sample paraphrase of lines of Brutus’s speech in Act I, Scene 1. Wherefore rejoice? What conquest brings he home?/What tributaries follow him to Rome,/To grace in captive bonds his chariot wheels?/You blocks, you stones, you worse than senseless things! /O you hard hearts, you cruel men of Rome, Knew you not Pompey? Why are you celebrating? What victory is coming this way? What supplies is he bringing to Rome? Is he bringing slaves in carts? You easily led people! You have forgotten! You are disloyal, don’t you remember your old leader Pompey?

Why is Paraphrasing Shakespeare important? When we paraphrase literature, it helps us understand key points made. By paraphrasing, we can discuss someone’s argument or text directly & argument is what we will be evaluating in this text!

What about Summary? Summarizing means condensing longer material, keeping the essential or main ideas and omitting unnecessary parts. A summary is written in your own words. A paragraph of information turns in to one sentence in your own words.

When you are done paraphrasing a speech, noting all the key points, you should also summarize what the main idea of a speech was to help your understanding of a character’s argument.

Below is a sample paraphrase of lines of Brutus’s speech in Act I, Scene 1. Wherefore rejoice? What conquest brings he home?/What tributaries follow him to Rome,/To grace in captive bonds his chariot wheels?/You blocks, you stones, you worse than senseless things! /O you hard hearts, you cruel men of Rome, Knew you not Pompey? Why are you celebrating? What victory is coming this way? What supplies is he bringing to Rome? Is he bringing slaves in carts? You easily led people! You have forgotten! You are disloyal, don’t you remember your old leader Pompey? Summary: Marullus does not like it that people are celebrating Caesar because it is disloyal to Pompey.