The own-words rule sits on the cover of every Paper 2, and it quietly decides a large share of your comprehension marks. Lift a phrase and the point scores nothing, however right the idea. This is how to paraphrase cleanly, give genuinely distinct points, and handle vocabulary in context.
The instruction on the cover asks you to use your own words as far as possible. That last phrase matters. It does not mean you must invent synonyms for technical terms that have no synonym. It means you must not copy the passage's distinctive wording and present it as your answer. As a working rule, lifting four or more consecutive words from the passage will cost you the mark for that point.
The reason is simple: the question is testing whether you understood the idea, and copying proves only that you found it. Paraphrasing proves you understood it well enough to say it another way. That is the skill being marked, so that is the skill you have to show.
Read the relevant sentence, then look away from the passage and say the idea in your own words before you write. If your eyes stay on the passage while you write, your hand copies its structure without you noticing. The look-away step breaks that habit.
Change both the words and the shape of the sentence, not just the words. Swapping individual words for synonyms while keeping the original grammar still reads as lifting. Suppose a passage said a city's relentless pace leaves its residents perpetually exhausted. A weak paraphrase swaps two words: a city's constant pace leaves residents always tired. A strong one rebuilds it: people who live in fast-moving cities rarely get the chance to recover, so tiredness becomes their normal state.
The marks tell you how many points to give. A two-mark question wants two points, no more and no less. The trap is padding: after finding one strong idea, students reach for a second by rewording the first, and call it two. Markers see through it instantly, and it earns one mark, not two.
Use a simple test before you submit. Put the words in other words at the start of your second point. If it still makes sense, your two points are the same idea at two levels of generality, and you have one point. Go back and find a second mechanism that genuinely differs from the first.
Passages sometimes quote a person inside the text. Those quoted words count as the passage's wording for the own-words rule, so you cannot lift them either. If a passage quotes an expert warning that machines could outthink us, you must not borrow outthink us; you paraphrase it as surpass human intelligence or similar.
This catches a lot of careful students, because a quotation feels like fair game. It is not. The cover rule applies to everything printed in the passage, including the words the passage puts in someone else's mouth.
When a question quotes a phrase and asks you to explain the writer's use of it, the phrase is almost always figurative, and the marks are for the transfer: what image the writer borrowed, and what it maps onto in the passage. The dictionary meaning alone never earns the mark, and neither does describing the situation.
Take an invented example. Suppose a writer describes a struggling town's last factory as the final heartbeat of the local economy. To explain the use, you name the image (a heartbeat as the sign of life, the last one signalling that life is ending) and connect it to the context (the factory is the one remaining source of jobs, and its closure would mean the economic death of the town). Name the image, apply it, done.
Some vocabulary questions are worth two marks. The extra mark is not for a longer definition; it is for splitting the answer into two halves. The first mark is the image itself, explained as a concept. The second is what that image applies to in the passage, and why it fits.
Using the heartbeat example, the first mark explains that a final heartbeat means the last sign of life before death. The second explains that the factory is the town's only remaining source of employment, so its loss would end the town's economic life. Cover both halves explicitly. An answer that gives only the situation, the factory is closing, leaves the image unexplained and drops the first mark.
Book a free trial lesson and see how we teach GP from the exam backwards, with marked practice against the band descriptors.