Student Question
How would you paraphrase this passage from James Joyce's "Araby"?
I quickened my pace and passed her. This happened morning after morning. I had never spoken to her, except for a few casual words, and yet her name was like a summons to all my foolish blood.
Quick answer:
In order to paraphrase this passage from James Joyce's "Araby," it's important to understand the basic message of the statement. One way to do this is to separate the sentences into their parts. Once you've read the statement and understand the gist of it, you can put it aside and rewrite it in your own words.
The goal of paraphrasing is to find more concise ways to express and also understand ideas, making it easier faster for readers to grasp the subject matter. In order to paraphrase, it's a good idea to first isolate the main parts of each sentence. This will allow you to simplify the sentence structure. Let's take the first sentence of the submitted passage from James Joyce's "Araby", for example:
I quickened my pace and passed her.
The subject of the sentence would be "I," the predicate would be "quickened my pace and passed," and the object of the sentence would be "her". We can understand that what is happening in the first sentence is that the subject of the sentence (I) sped up and also that they passed the object of the sentence (her). So another way to say it might be:
I sped up and passed her.
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I sped up and passed her.
This sentence means the same thing as the first one but is faster and perhaps easier to read. Keep in mind that there are other possible paraphrases of the sentence. By using this process with each of the sentences in the statement, you will hopefully end up with a more concise, and paraphrased, statement.
Another technique that is helpful in attempting to paraphrase is to read the original item until you grasp the meaning, then put it aside and write down what it means in your own words, leaving out unnecessary descriptors. This might be especially helpful in the last sentence of the statement submitted, because it is rather complicated with its multiple clauses:
I had never spoken to her, except for a few casual words, and yet her name was like a summons to all my foolish blood.
The essence of this sentence is that the subject (I) barely knows the object (her) but still has such strong feelings about her that even the mention of her name makes the subject upset. From here you can rewrite the sentence in your own words without looking at the original sentence.