– Collocations in the formation of two part phrasal verbs (break up/fill out/take off)
– Changing present tenses from an infinitive to a gerund (William likes to eat chocolate vs. William likes eating chocolate)
– Personal pronoun inversion (I shouldn’t eat pizza vs Eating pizza isn’t good for my health
– Fixed expressions synonymous with words in the original sentence (I hate it when dogs bark vs. I can’t stand it when dogs bark)
– Shifting a tense or word category found in the original sentence to a different tense whilst keeping the same meaning in the second sentence (I enjoyed playing soccer with my friends vs. I played soccer with my friends and it was enjoyable)
Looking at the list above might seem scary, but that is normal! Improving your score on key word transformation takes time and is similar to driving a car. Imagine you’ve never had driving lessons. At first, you might think driving seems easy. All you have to do is put your seat belt on and hit the accelerate or break pedals right? In a years time, once you have passed your driving test you begin to understand that driving a car requires you to understand a variety of smaller tasks, all of which make you a great driver. You need to check your mirrors, be aware of other people in the street, make way for bicycles and begin to stop for a traffic light in plenty of time. Keyword transformations are very much the same. Start slow, master the basic techniques and keep on practicing.