Paraphrasing Tool

About the Paraphrasing Tool

To paraphrase well is to hold the meaning completely still while everything around it moves. That is harder than it sounds, and it is where most rewording falls down: a thesaurus pass swaps words for near-synonyms until the sentence is technically different and slightly wrong, hedges become assertions, and a study that found no effect ends up having found one.

This page rewords your text with the facts pinned. Every figure, date, name and the direction of every claim has to survive intact. If the original says early results suggest, the rewrite says early results suggest. What changes is the wording, the sentence shapes and, where you ask for it, the register.

Two controls decide how far from the original you land. The style setting picks a direction: fluent for better rhythm, formal for a report, simple words for a general audience, creative when you want the imagery rebuilt rather than adjusted, or shorter and longer when the length is the problem. The strength slider decides distance. At one, a handful of words change and the sentences stay where they are. At five, nothing but proper nouns and figures survives verbatim — the passage is rebuilt from its meaning. Most work sits at three, where each sentence is rewritten in turn and the order of ideas is untouched.

There is a switch for technical terms, on unless you turn it off, and the reason for it is worth stating. A synonym for a defined term is a different term. In a document about latency, replacing "latency" with "lag" in one paragraph has introduced an ambiguity that was not there before. Turn it off only when you are deliberately rendering specialist writing for people outside the specialism.

One thing worth saying plainly, because the category attracts the question: changing the words does not change whose ideas they are. If the substance came from a source, cite the source. Rewording is a writing tool, not a way around attribution, and no rewriting tool has ever made an uncredited borrowing into original work.

How to use it

1. 1Paste the passage you want said differently.
2. 2Pick a style — fluent, formal, simple, creative, shorter or longer.
3. 3Set the strength slider: low for a light touch, high to rebuild the sentences entirely.
4. 4Leave technical terms locked unless you are deliberately writing for a non-specialist reader.
5. 5Read the result against the original and check every number and claim still says what it said.

Questions

Does this help me avoid plagiarism?

No, and it is worth being direct about it. Plagiarism is presenting someone else's ideas as your own; the words are only the evidence. A reworded passage taken from a source you do not credit is still taken from that source. Use this for your own writing, or alongside a proper citation, and the question does not arise.

Why did it change a number I wanted left alone?

It should not have — every figure is meant to survive unchanged, and that instruction is explicit. If it happens, lower the strength slider, which reduces how much the sentence is rebuilt and therefore how much can go astray. Always check figures against the original regardless of the setting.

What is the difference between the highest strength and a summary?

Length, and what is allowed to disappear. Even at full strength the rewording keeps every point the original made, using entirely different sentences. A summary is permitted to drop things. If you want less text rather than different text, the summarising page is the right one.

Can I run the same passage twice for a different result?

Yes. This tool runs warmer than most on this site, so two runs of the same input give genuinely different rewordings. That is useful when the first attempt is close but one sentence in it is awkward.