Paraphrasing Tool

What it will not touch

Most paraphrasers treat a passage as one undifferentiated block of words. That is how a rewrite turns (Smith, 2020) into (Smith, 2021), quietly converts a quotation into a paraphrase that still sits inside quotation marks, or rounds a figure because a synonym felt smoother. Each of those is worse than the sentence you started with.

This one is told, and then checked, that in-text citations, reference markers, quoted material, numbers, units, dates, and proper nouns must appear in the output exactly as they appeared in the input. If a citation does not survive, the result says so instead of letting you find out after submission.

Why the changed words are highlighted

A rewrite you cannot inspect is a rewrite you have to trust. The output marks every word that differs from what you pasted, so you can read the changes rather than the whole passage again, and catch the place where a synonym shifted the claim.

The percentage above the result tells you how much of the wording moved. A very low number usually means the original was already tight. A very high one is worth reading closely — heavy rewriting is where meaning drifts.

Paraphrasing is not a way around plagiarism

Rewording someone else's idea and leaving the citation off is still plagiarism, and running it through a tool does not change that. A paraphrase needs a citation for exactly the same reason a quotation does: the idea is not yours.

What paraphrasing legitimately does is let you present a source's point in your own voice, at the length your argument needs, instead of stacking block quotations. Used that way it is a normal part of academic writing — and it is why this tool works hard to keep your citations attached.

Choosing a mode

Standard rewords without moving the register, which suits a draft that already sounds like you. Academic raises formality: contractions go, colloquialisms go, verbs get more precise — useful when feedback said the tone was too casual.

Plain does the opposite, breaking long clauses into shorter sentences and preferring common words, which helps when a paragraph is technically correct but unreadable. Fluent leaves the register alone and fixes awkwardness and repetition.

The free limit

The tool handles up to 400 words at a time. That is a long paragraph or a short section, which is the unit paraphrasing actually works on — feeding it a whole essay produces a uniformly reworded piece with the same structural problems it had before.

If the whole draft needs work, the honest answer is not more rewriting. It is an editor who can tell you the third paragraph is doing the job the introduction should be doing.

Related tools and guides

• Word counter Check the length before and after
• Citation generator The citation your paraphrase needs
• Annotated bibliographies Summarising a source in your own words
• Editing and proofreading When rewording is not the problem

Frequently asked questions