Paraphrasing Tool: Online, Free, Easy-to-Use
If you don’t know what you can use it for, let’s break down the term paraphrasing and learn more about paraphrasing and plagiarism.
Paraphrasing: Definition
What is paraphrasing? Paraphrasing is delivering someone else's idea using your own words. While paraphrasing, you don't only deliver the source's main points but reword the whole idea. We use paraphrasing in our daily lives, too: telling your friends about a movie you've watched or a book you've read is also paraphrasing.
Paraphrasing vs. Summarizing
What is the difference between paraphrasing and summarizing? First, if paraphrasing implies rewriting the whole idea of the source, summarizing means delivering only the main points. A summary is usually much shorter than a paraphrased material. Although paraphrasing and summarizing have some similarities, it is essential to differentiate them.
Is Paraphrasing Plagiarism?
Although you don’t use direct quoting here, paraphrasing is still plagiarism. Any usage of someone else’s ideas is considered plagiarism in academic writing. It even has a term – paraphrasing plagiarism. It is because you don't use your ideas but others' when you paraphrase.
So, how to avoid paraphrasing plagiarism? Your citations should be formatted correctly. You need to put the author and the date of publication in the text and all the detailed information about the source in your reference list. Your paper might be written without citations, but only if you didn’t use others’ ideas and quotes.
Let’s look at the bad and good examples of paraphrasing the passage from Robert A. Dahl’s article about power.
Original passage:
“A has power over B to the extent that he can get B to do something that B would not otherwise do.”
| Bad paraphrasing | Good paraphrasing |
| A has an influence on B. This influence is crucial that A can persuade B to do something that B wouldn’t do otherwise. | According to Dahl (1957), power is an influence that can persuade another person to do something that person wouldn’t do otherwise. |
How to Paraphrase? 4 Best Tips
If you are still struggling with paraphrasing, here are the four best tips for you. You can use them together or separately in your work. You can even try using all four of them in a single sentence.
- Break down lengthy sentences.
Although you should keep the number of words similar to the source, you can break the long sentences down. If you have one compound sentence, you can split it into two or more simple ones.
- Change the order of ideas or words in one sentence.
Put the idea that was at the beginning of the original sentence at the end of the paraphrased one. For example, let’s say the structure of the original sentence is cause first, then effect. You can put the effect first and conclude it with the cause.
- Try restating the words using synonyms.
Another good method of paraphrasing is using synonyms. Try using as many as you can. Be careful with terms and professional vocabulary. Refer to a dictionary if you are not sure about the meaning or definition of some words.
- Change the voice of a sentence.
If a sentence was originally written using an active voice, change it into a passive and the other way round. For example, you can change “the book was written by him” to “he wrote this book.”
Let’s take a look at the examples of how to use these four techniques in one passage.
The following is a passage from an article Detecting Emotional Contagion in Massive Social Networks. The passage is about emotional states transmitting from people to people.
| Original passage | Paraphrased passage |
| “Emotional states can be transferred directly from one individual to another via mimicry and the copying of emotionally-relevant bodily actions like facial expressions. Experiments have demonstrated that people can “catch” emotional states they observe in others over time frames ranging from seconds to months.” | Body language and facial articulation mimicking can cause mental conditions transmitting from person to person. According to researches, these mental conditions can be transmitted by watching others have them. It can take you from seconds to months to catch someone else’s emotions. |
Best Paraphrasing Tool: How to Choose?
You can surely do rewording by yourself, but it takes a lot of time. And what if you need the text written as soon as possible? In that case, you can use a paraphrasing tool. So how do you choose one?
Here’s what you need to take into account while choosing a paraphrasing tool.
- Is there a word limit for the text?
- Can you upload your text?
- Can you download your text as a file?
- What formats are available? (.txt, .pdf, .doc, etc.)
- Can you manage the number of words in a paraphrased text?
- What languages are available?
- How long does it take to paraphrase the text?
- Are there any ads on the website?
- How much does it cost?
- What software does it require?
Paraphrasing Tool: FAQ
Paraphrasing is a crucial skill. While paraphrasing, you can also get a better understanding of the original material. You can take the information from different scholarly sources to use it in your paper if you give credit. You can use our free online paraphrasing tool to save time.
Let’s first learn what paraphrasing is. Paraphrasing is restating the original idea using different words. The point is that you deliver not only some parts of the original writing but the whole idea. Quoting, on the other hand, is copying some parts of the original writing to your work using quotation marks.
Paraphrasing serves as a tool to avoid plagiarism. You can use someone else’s idea using your words. However, you have to give credit to the original author. Paraphrasing also shows that you understand the material so well that you can restate it. However, you can always use our article rewriter if you don’t have enough time.
While paraphrasing, you don’t use word-by-word copying, so it helps to avoid cheating. Although you take someone else’s idea, it is not illegal if you give credit and cite the source correctly. To save your time, you can use free online paraphrasing tools you can use for your paper.