Paraphrasing is a writing/editing technique that has a lot of different uses and benefits. It can be used by bloggers, digital marketers, and lots of other kinds of people.

It can also be used by students and academics to improve their academic writing. There are different facets of academic writing that can be improved with the help of paraphrasing. For example, the clarity or flow of a piece of text can be paraphrased to be improved, etc.

Nowadays, paraphrasing is done with the help of online paraphrasing tools. These tools utilize AI to paraphrase/rephrase content and make it look better.

The good thing about paraphrasing tools is that if they are utilized properly, they can do more than just improve the quality of a specific piece of content. They can also be used to improve your own writing skills.

How exactly? That is what we’re going to be looking at.

What exactly do paraphrasing tools do?

We did just describe what paraphrasing tools do in the introduction, but we want to make it a bit more precise and detailed.

In the process of paraphrasing, there are different changes made to the content. Depending on the need behind the paraphrasing as well as the length of the text, a few of those changes can be made, or all of them.

Those changes include:

• Synonymizing, i.e., the process of replacing the existing words with their synonyms.
• Changing the sentence structure, i.e., changing the placement of the object, subject, and verb in the sentences. In a lot of cases, this just comes down to changing active voice sentences to passive, and vice versa.

Now, a paraphrasing tool is designed to make these types of changes (and others as well) on its own. In other words, the intervention of a human is not necessary.

To give you an example of how these tools work, here is one that we found online. We gave it some text from this content that we’re writing, and here is the output:

The tool that we’ve used in the screenshot above is called Paraphraseonline.io. You can use it for free yourself if you want. We will be using it for the other demonstrations in our article as well.

How can paraphrasing tools help you improve your academic writing skills?

Now that we’ve understood what paraphrasing tools are and how they work, let’s move on to look at how they can help in building your academic writing skills.

1.     Paraphrasing tools can help you build your vocabulary

Having a good vocabulary can be very beneficial for academic writing. You can make your content more descriptive, and you can write more confidently when you have a nice and heavy word bank in your mind.

With paraphrasing tools, you can work on improving your vocab. How exactly? By following this process:

• You first have to write down some content in your own words, i.e., with the vocabulary that you already know
• Then, you can paraphrase it with an online paraphrasing tool
• When the tool will change the text, it will synonymize it
• When the synonymizing is done, new words will be adjusted in place of the ones that you had originally utilized
• Since the new words will be in place of the ones that you had originally known and written yourself, you will be able to understand their meaning easily

Let’s show this with an example. We’re going to write something using the most complicated words we know:

The querulous complaints of the youngster did not elicit the reaction he thought they would from his peers and teachers. What he got, instead, was a reprimand and an early leave to go home and listen to some more remonstrations from his father.

This is some random text, and now we’ll paraphrase it:

In the output, you can see that the word “querulous” was changed by “sad” and “remonstration” was changed with “accusations.”

While this is simply an example, doing this type of exercise can help improve your vocabulary.

2.     Paraphrasing tools can help you improve the flow and clarity of your content

Just as you can improve your vocabulary using online paraphrasing tools, you can also learn how to improve the flow and clarity of your content.

You can write down the sentences as you would normally. And then you can para+phrase them.

When the tool is done with the sentences, they will be more readable and clear (in usual cases) than the input. You can then look at the changes the tool has made, and then implement the same technique/structure the next time you have to write something.

3.     Paraphrasing tools can help you learn how to write the same type of content differently

In academic writing, there are different instances where you may be required to write the same content in a different way. For example, if you are writing a research paper, then you may need to refer back to an argument mentioned in an earlier section. In such a case, you’d have to write down the same information and data, but in different words.

By using a paraphrasing tool regularly, you can learn how to use different words and sentence arrangements to convey the same information in various ways. To give you an idea, here is a paraphrasing tool that we’ve used multiple times on the same sentence. You can see how it changes the sentence differently each time:

In this particular tool that we’re using, there are different modes available that allow us to get a different output each time.

Wrapping up

There you have it.

The whole concept of using paraphrasing tools to improve your academic writing skills is not that difficult or complicated. There are a few things that you can do with these tools and a few aspects of your writing skills that you can improve. The thing is to do them all consistently.

We hope you enjoyed reading this post and that you learned something new here. Thanks for your time!