paraphrasing tool grammarly checker

The best AI grammar checkers and rewording tools

These ai content editing apps will make your writing shine..

With all the hype around ChatGPT, it'd be easy to forget that AI tools have existed for a while. One area where AI has been working its magic for years is in AI grammar checkers.

So, if you're looking for an AI grammar checker or rewording tool to help you spot and fix typos, improve your grammar, or take your content to the next level, you've come to the right place. I considered dozens of apps and did in-depth testing on the top contenders to narrow it down to these six apps.

Grammarly for all-around editing

Wordtune for rewriting, shortening, and expanding content

ProWritingAid for informative evaluation reports

Microsoft Editor for Microsoft 365 integration

WordRake for professionals wanting clarity

LanguageTool for multilingual writers

What makes the best AI grammar checker and rewording tool?

How we evaluate and test apps.

Our best apps roundups are written by humans who've spent much of their careers using, testing, and writing about software. Unless explicitly stated, we spend dozens of hours researching and testing apps, using each app as it's intended to be used and evaluating it against the criteria we set for the category. We're never paid for placement in our articles from any app or for links to any site—we value the trust readers put in us to offer authentic evaluations of the categories and apps we review. For more details on our process, read the full rundown of how we select apps to feature on the Zapier blog .

There are plenty of lists of the best AI grammar checkers, so what makes this one different? For starters, many of those lists become intertwined with AI generative writing apps, but this one steers clear and focuses primarily on AI content editing apps. Second, I didn't just read these apps' marketing materials and customer reviews. I spent dozens of hours researching and testing the best AI rewording tools, paraphrasing apps, grammar checkers, and other similar tools.

For transparency, I've used some of these apps for many years in my writing career. But I was also keen to review the competition and see what I was potentially missing out on. For each one, I signed up and ran the editor through its paces, testing various scenarios, like spotting and fixing spelling and grammar errors or cutting fluff to make the text more concise. 

I was also mindful that some editing apps do one thing well, like paraphrasing, while others cover several bases. In my experience, I've not found one editing app that does everything well. And that's fine, as long as you know how to use a couple in tandem.

As I was testing the apps, here's what I was looking for:

Apps that focus on AI editing, not AI writing. As mentioned above, some tools focus on generative AI writing with a few editing features thrown in. Those tools didn't make the list. 

Spelling and grammar checker. This is probably the most common feature of AI content editing apps, but it's also the most unpredictable, with false negatives and positives. 

Options to create a custom lexicon/style guide. In some situations, especially when working in larger teams, you'll want to build a custom style guide, so everyone writes consistently.

The ability to rewrite, shorten, or lengthen content. Also known as paraphrasing or rewording, this is an invaluable feature when you want to write concisely or expand on a point.

Apps that check for plagiarism. A plagiarism checker scours the internet and highlights possible sources to ensure that no content has been taken from another source without permission.

Overall, I whittled the list down from 30 possibles to the best 6 AI grammar checkers and rewording tools.

Best all-around AI grammar checker

Grammarly works on multiple desktop and mobile platforms, browsers, and apps. It's a comprehensive AI editing tool covering all our features except paraphrasing. That said, it does prompt rewrites for conciseness and clarity automatically—it's just that you can't highlight a sentence or paragraph and ask it to rewrite/shorten/lengthen at will. But if you want to quickly reword sentences, you can use its free online paraphrasing tool .

As a long-time user of Grammarly, I'm familiar with its quirks. Sometimes the suggestions are off or totally wrong—but, hey, it's a machine, not a human, and it suggests more positives than negatives. One thing I like is the flexibility to switch the Chrome browser extension on or off. So, for example, I keep it switched off while writing in Google Docs, so I don't get interrupted with suggestions. I much prefer to copy the text into the desktop editor afterward and work in editing mode then. The browser extension also doesn't play well in WordPress, so I switch it off there again.

You'll have to upgrade to the business plan if you want to create a style guide for your organization. So, for example, monday.com could specify that employees use "monday.com" when writing about their company. 

The business plan also lets you configure snippets and brand tones, and provides an analytics dashboard so that you can identify team writing trends. 

The recent addition of a generative AI tool, GrammarlyGO , adds a few extra editing features, including options to identify gaps in writing, offer general improvement ideas, and pick out the main point. They aren't particularly insightful (yet), but it's nice to see Grammarly continuing to develop its tools.

Grammarly pricing: Free plan available, then $12/month for the Premium plan and $15/member/month (with at least 3 team members) for the Business plan. 

Best rewording tool for rewriting, shortening, or expanding content

Wordtune is the perfect companion to Grammarly. While it doesn't check for plagiarism, it excels at rewriting, shortening, and expanding your content. It can even make suggestions for a more casual or formal tone. 

You can use it as an online editor—where you also get spelling and grammar suggestions—an add-in for Microsoft Word, or a Chrome extension. For example, working in Google Docs, it just hovers on-screen, waiting for you to put it to work. Simply highlight the text you want to rewrite, and it delivers several alternatives.

It's a great option for when you need a fresh take on what you've been working on.

Wordtune pricing: There's a free version limited to 10 rewrites per day, which is a good starting point. But the premium version—$24.99/month or $119.88/year— gives you unlimited access to all the features and the ability to rewrite entire paragraphs.

Best AI grammar checker for evaluation reports

Prowritingaid.

ProWritingAid works along the same lines as Grammarly, including the online editor where you can copy/paste your text or upload a document to work on. The interface is more crowded than Grammarly, with lots of reports and scores in the margins. It can be a little distracting initially, but it did highlight errors that Grammarly missed. For example, it stipulates that en dashes shouldn't have a space on either side.

There are also desktop apps for Windows and Mac, browser extensions, and add-ons for Microsoft Word and Google Docs. I couldn't get the Chrome extension to work for Google Docs—I had to install the specific plug-in. And even then, you can only generate a Summary Report or an Improve Document Report like you get in the online editor, so it didn't save time by offering in-line suggestions.

One major plus for ProWritingAid is that you can create your custom style guide in the premium version—no need to upgrade further to a team version like you'd need to do with Grammarly. I tested this by adding a rule about not having spaces on either side of an em dash on the Zapier blog. For example:

INCORRECT: You can use it as an online editor — where you get spelling and grammar suggestions — an add-in for MS Word, or a Chrome extension.

CORRECT: You can use it as an online editor—where you get spelling and grammar suggestions—an add-in for MS Word, or a Chrome extension.

ProWritingAid also has a Rephraser tool (currently in beta), which works like Wordtune and offers several rewriting suggestions per sentence.

ProWritingAid pricing: There's a free version limited to 500 words and 10 rephrases per day, giving you basic writing suggestions. But you'll want the unlimited premium version with extra functionality to "edit like a pro." 

Best integrated AI grammar checker for Microsoft 365

Microsoft editor.

Microsoft Editor is only available on macOS and Windows desktop devices or as a free browser extension for Chrome and Edge. You can use a free Microsoft account to see basic spelling and grammar checks, but for premium features, you'll need to subscribe to Microsoft 365.

Here, you can define your writing style with grammar and refinements. For example, you can check for things like passive voice, adverb placement, and adjective order, or make your writing more formal or concise. 

You can use Microsoft Editor in Gmail, Outlook, LinkedIn, and other social media platforms on the web, but for serious editing, you'll want to use Microsoft Word. Here, you can activate the sidebar menu to see an overall score with corrections and refinements, plus an option to check for similarity (plagiarism). 

Microsoft Editor pricing: There's a free version with basic spelling and grammar checks. The premium version is available with a Microsoft 365 subscription, starting from $6.99/month.

Best AI grammar checker for brevity and simplicity

Wordrake edits for brevity and simplicity. You can choose:

Brevity mode to prioritize succinct writing

Simplicity mode to prioritize familiar word choices

Or both options to maximize your editing suggestions

The main caveat: it only works in Microsoft Word and Outlook. It uses the familiar Microsoft Word track-changes style to highlight possible improvements, which you then accept or reject.

WordRake targets professionals, like lawyers, who need to tighten legal briefs. (Imagine a world without legal jargon!) For example, it can:

Edit for plain language and reduce jargon and legalese

Cut throat-clearing introductory phrases

Remove unnecessary descriptive words and modifiers

Correct nominalizations and wordy adjective phrases

Remove redundancies and correct usage errors

Catch high-level grammar and punctuation mistakes

Edit conversational language to be more professional

Reduce wordiness and meet word counts

It does a very specific job, but a very important one. And it does it well.

WordRake pricing: There's a 7-day free trial; then it's $17/month ($129/year) for Microsoft Word (Mac or Windows) or $24/month ($199/year) for Microsoft Word and Outlook (Windows only).

Best AI grammar checker for multilingual writers

Languagetool.

LanguageTool is a multilingual grammar, style, and spell checker with an AI-powered sentence rephraser and custom style guide. The rephrased suggestions are as good as other apps like Wordtune, and the level of grammar and spelling matches Grammarly.

You can copy your text or upload a Word document into the online editor to check and fix errors or paraphrase it. Once you've made your changes, you can export it as a Word document or copy and paste your text back into your doc. Alternatively, you can install the software on multiple platforms, including: 

Desktop apps: macOS, Windows 

Browser extensions: Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Safari, Opera

Office plugins: Google Docs, Microsoft Word, OpenOffice, LibreOffice

Email add-ons: Gmail, Apple Mail, Thunderbird

Another nice feature in the settings is the option to select the Oxford comma in British English. (It's standard on other English varieties like U.S. and Canadian.) I also found the style guide worked as well as Grammarly and ProWritingAid when I performed similar tests.

Enter a text in a different language, and the app auto-detects the change and makes suggestions. For example, I pasted in some Spanish text, and it instantly switched to Spanish and highlighted some spelling and grammar errors.

LanguageTool pricing: Free plan available; then $24.99/month for individuals or $56.90/user/year for small teams of up to 20 members. 

Should you use an AI grammar checker or rewording tool?

As a freelance writer, I rely on AI content editing apps to highlight areas for improvement in my first drafts. Do I accept all the suggestions? No, I don't. And that's the rub. 

AI editing tools are an aid—they're not perfect. But between me and them, I can produce a solid first draft before my editors apply their superpowers. So my advice is to take them for a spin. Most have a free trial or free version to get you started, and then you can choose the premium AI grammar checker or rewording tool that works best for you.

Related reading:

How to self-edit your marketing writing

6 ways to make your content stand out from AI writing

Create a digital assistant with Zapier and AI

ProWritingAid vs. Grammarly: Which should you use?

How to detect AI-generated content

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David Hartshorne

David is a freelance writer for leading B2B SaaS and tech brands, creating detailed, actionable content that resonates with their audience. When he’s not writing, you’ll find him chilling with a thriller or roaring on the Villa.

• Artificial intelligence (AI)
• Media and editorial
• Content marketing

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Quillbot vs. Grammarly: Which Tool Is a Better Writing Assistant?

Can't decide between Quillbot and Grammarly? Here's a quick comparison to help you choose the best writing assistant for you.

Writing can be a challenging endeavor, especially when trying to maintain perfect grammar and error-free content. Thanks to technological advancement, we now have advanced AI writing tools that help writers improve and polish their work.

Among the top contenders on the market are Quillbot and Grammarly, both of which offer unique features and claim to enhance writing proficiency, but in slightly different ways. In this comparison, we will thoroughly evaluate and contrast these two popular writing assistants to help you determine which one is best for your needs.

Overview of Quillbot

Quillbot is an AI-powered writing tool that stands out for its remarkable paraphrasing capabilities. Quillbot utilizes cutting-edge natural language processing (NLP) techniques to help users write better and find new phrases.

In addition to paraphrasing, Quillbot offers several features that assist you with your writing, including summarizing, grammar checking, plagiarism checking, citation generation, and AI content creation.

With an intuitive user interface, multiple writing modes, thesaurus support, and seamless integration with popular platforms, Quillbot becomes a powerful tool for writers, students, and professionals looking to avoid plagiarism or simplify complex ideas.

Overview of Grammarly

Grammarly is a popular AI-integrated writing tool renowned for its ability to effectively modify, correct, and proofread content. It offers a wide range of features, including real-time grammar checking, contextual suggestions for clarity and conciseness, vocabulary enhancement, plagiarism detection (in the premium version), and support for multiple writing styles.

Grammarly's recent introduction of the GrammarlyGo tool helps it compete with Quillbot neck to neck by enabling users to enhance their sentences and even generate new content.

Quillbot vs. Grammarly: Differences

Although Quillbot and Grammarly are both AI writing assistant tools, they serve different purposes. Quillbot is popularly known as the best paraphrasing tool , whereas Grammarly excels as the best grammar checker . Alongside this prominent difference, the two tools have several other distinctions:

1. Paraphrasing

Grammarly and Quillbot both offer paraphrasing capabilities, but one clearly excels over the other in terms of accuracy and effectiveness.

Grammarly's new AI tool, GrammarlyGO, does an incredible job at rephrasing short paragraphs and long blocks of text by rewriting the whole thing in a completely unique way without losing the original meaning. You can also set the tone for the rephrasing, such as Neutral, Formal, Casual, Informative, and more.

Quillbot's paraphraser, on the other hand, lacks significantly in its paraphrasing ability, which is shocking considering that it's primarily known as a paraphraser tool. It works by simply replacing some of the words in the sentences with synonyms, which aren’t always entirely accurate either. In the premium version, you can set the tone for paraphrasing and even choose to expand or shorten a sentence while rewriting.

One thing that we do like about Quillbot’s paraphraser tool allows you to paraphrase sentences in several languages, including English, Spanish, German, French, Chinese, Italian, Japanese, Romanian, Polish, and more.

2. AI Content Creation

Quillbot lets you generate content from scratch using its Suggest Text feature, and so does GrammarlyGO. Both tools do a great job at suggesting and writing new content from scratch, but they differ in the way they work.

Quillbot’s AI content creation feature works by suggesting the next paragraph that you should incorporate into your writing. The tool requires constant input from the user, and you need to write a sentence or two yourself before it can generate the next content suggestion. This can be inconvenient if you’re looking to write an entire essay or article without putting in any information yourself.

Thankfully, GrammarlyGO understands this need and works similarly to some of the best AI writing tools , like Jarvis and ChatGPT, by generating entire essays and articles of 1000+ words, all on its own. All you have to do is type in the topic you want to write about and press Enter .

The tool generates an entire article within just a few seconds! What’s more? You can also request the AI to refine the content it produces by giving commands such as “make it more descriptive” or “make it sound formal” or ask it to rephrase its own work.

3. Translator

The one feature that Quillbot has, but Grammarly lacks, is a built-in translator that allows you to translate content between different languages. You can translate content into 34 different languages using Quillbot’s translator.

Grammarly does not offer any translation capabilities, and even its new GrammarlyGO feature is only available in English.

4. Writing Style and Tone

Grammarly shines in understanding and adapting to different writing styles and tones. It offers personalized suggestions on fluency, consistency, clarity, engagement, delivery, and a style guide based on the tone set and the target audience. It also intelligently provides vocabulary ideas and synonyms for words as they appear in your document.

Additionally, you can also ask the GrammarlyGO AI assistant to identify any gaps in your writing, provide suggestions on improving the content or even rewrite entire paragraphs in your desired tone and style.

Quillbot is not as nuanced in understanding the subtleties of different writing styles. The most it does is identify passive sentences and offer suggestions for turning them into active. However, this feature is only accessible in the premium version of the software.

Quillbot vs. Grammarly: Similarities

Despite their differences, Quillbot and Grammarly share a few similarities:

1. Browser Integration and User Interface

Both Quillbot and Grammarly have made significant efforts to create user-friendly interfaces. They offer seamless integration with web browsers and popular word processors, making it incredibly convenient for you to access their features. Additionally, their user interfaces are intuitive, making it easy for writers of all levels to navigate and utilize the tools effectively.

2. Plagiarism Checker

Both Quillbot and Grammarly offer plagiarism checkers that need to be accessed via a premium subscription to the platform. They function similarly, examining your content against their databases to provide information about originality percentages and instances of plagiarism as well as presenting matched results along with their sources.

However, Quillbot’s plagiarism checker is somewhat restrictive, as it only allows you to check 20 pages per month, even with a premium subscription. Grammarly does not have any such restrictions.

3. Grammar Checking

Quillbot and Grammarly both offer effective grammar-checking functionality, correctly identifying punctuation, agreement, capitalization, and spelling mistakes. However, both offer functionalities that make them stand out.

Grammarly offers an explanation for every grammar suggestion that it makes, which helps improve your overall grammar.

On the other hand, Quillbot's Grammar Checker stands out due to its capability to not only provide grammar checking for English but for German, French, and Spanish. This is a great feature, especially if you often write in languages other than English. This functionality is missing from Grammarly, which only allows grammar checking for the English language.

4. Premium Plans

Both Quillbot and Grammarly offer the convenience of choosing between premium and free versions of their writing assistant tools. With Quillbot’s premium version, you can access unlimited words in the paraphraser, faster processing speeds, plagiarism checking, and more. It has the following three plans:

• Monthly: $9.95
• Semi-annually: $39.95 billed every six months
• Annually: $49.95 billed every 12 months

Grammarly offers two different subscription plans: Premium and Business. The Premium version offers everything in the free version, plus advanced grammar checking, genre-specific writing suggestions, plagiarism checking, and enhanced writing insights. You can choose to pay $30 monthly, $60 quarterly, or $144 annually for the premium plan.

In contrast, the Business plan is mainly for businesses and teams and offers advanced security and style guide features. Grammarly offers a 7-day trial for its Business plan, and you can choose a monthly plan at $25 per member or opt for the annual plan at $12.25 per member per month.

5. Citation Tools

Quillbot and Grammarly both have a citation generator tool that helps you generate citations and check for proper citation formats. With support for APA, MLA, and Chicago styles, they offer a free solution for generating full and in-text citations for your academic papers and essays.

However, Quillbot's citation generator is a lot simpler to use. All you have to do is paste the URL of the website you want to generate citations for and choose the citation format, and the tool generates a citation within seconds.

Grammarly's citation tool is a lot more complicated, and you need to manually enter all the required details for it to generate a citation.

However, with Grammarly's Chrome extension, you can simplify this problem.

Simply go to the website you need citations for and click Get Citations at the bottom of the screen to generate auto-citations in your desired citation format.

Quillbot vs. Grammarly: Ideal Users

Quillbot is best suited for students, academics, content creators, and multilingual writers. It aids students and academics in avoiding plagiarism, grammar checking, auto-citations, and translations, while content creators benefit from AI content generation.

On the other hand, Grammarly is suitable for writers of all levels, including students, academics, business professionals, and content writers. It caters to anyone striving for polished writing, making it a versatile tool for several users.

Quillbot vs. Grammarly: Which Tool Is Best for You?

Quillbot and Grammarly are powerful AI writing assistants, each with unique features catering to different writing needs. While Grammarly initially focused on grammar checking, style recommendations, and plagiarism checking, it now offers content generation, rewriting, and summarizing capabilities, similar to Quillbot.

In our comparison, we found Grammarly to be better at almost everything except for translating, plagiarism checking, and affordability in premium plans. Quillbot, however, is great for multilingual users and people who require basic grammar checking and summarizing.

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• How to Paraphrase | Step-by-Step Guide & Examples

How to Paraphrase | Step-by-Step Guide & Examples

Published on April 8, 2022 by Courtney Gahan and Jack Caulfield. Revised on June 1, 2023.

Paraphrasing means putting someone else’s ideas into your own words. Paraphrasing a source involves changing the wording while preserving the original meaning.

Paraphrasing is an alternative to  quoting (copying someone’s exact words and putting them in quotation marks ). In academic writing, it’s usually better to integrate sources by paraphrasing instead of quoting. It shows that you have understood the source, reads more smoothly, and keeps your own voice front and center.

Every time you paraphrase, it’s important to cite the source . Also take care not to use wording that is too similar to the original. Otherwise, you could be at risk of committing plagiarism .

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Table of contents

How to paraphrase in five easy steps, how to paraphrase correctly, examples of paraphrasing, how to cite a paraphrase, paraphrasing vs. quoting, paraphrasing vs. summarizing, avoiding plagiarism when you paraphrase, other interesting articles, frequently asked questions about paraphrasing.

If you’re struggling to get to grips with the process of paraphrasing, check out our easy step-by-step guide in the video below.

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Putting an idea into your own words can be easier said than done. Let’s say you want to paraphrase the text below, about population decline in a particular species of sea snails.

Incorrect paraphrasing

You might make a first attempt to paraphrase it by swapping out a few words for  synonyms .

Like other sea creatures inhabiting the vicinity of highly populated coasts, horse conchs have lost substantial territory to advancement and contamination , including preferred breeding grounds along mud flats and seagrass beds. Their Gulf home is also heating up due to global warming , which scientists think further puts pressure on the creatures , predicated upon the harmful effects extra warmth has on other large mollusks (Barnett, 2022).

This attempt at paraphrasing doesn’t change the sentence structure or order of information, only some of the word choices. And the synonyms chosen are poor:

• “Advancement and contamination” doesn’t really convey the same meaning as “development and pollution.”
• Sometimes the changes make the tone less academic: “home” for “habitat” and “sea creatures” for “marine animals.”
• Adding phrases like “inhabiting the vicinity of” and “puts pressure on” makes the text needlessly long-winded.
• Global warming is related to climate change, but they don’t mean exactly the same thing.

Because of this, the text reads awkwardly, is longer than it needs to be, and remains too close to the original phrasing. This means you risk being accused of plagiarism .

Correct paraphrasing

Let’s look at a more effective way of paraphrasing the same text.

Here, we’ve:

• Only included the information that’s relevant to our argument (note that the paraphrase is shorter than the original)
• Introduced the information with the signal phrase “Scientists believe that …”
• Retained key terms like “development and pollution,” since changing them could alter the meaning
• Structured sentences in our own way instead of copying the structure of the original
• Started from a different point, presenting information in a different order

Because of this, we’re able to clearly convey the relevant information from the source without sticking too close to the original phrasing.

Explore the tabs below to see examples of paraphrasing in action.

• Journal article
• Newspaper article
• Magazine article

Once you have your perfectly paraphrased text, you need to ensure you credit the original author. You’ll always paraphrase sources in the same way, but you’ll have to use a different type of in-text citation depending on what citation style you follow.

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It’s a good idea to paraphrase instead of quoting in most cases because:

• Paraphrasing shows that you fully understand the meaning of a text
• Your own voice remains dominant throughout your paper
• Quotes reduce the readability of your text

But that doesn’t mean you should never quote. Quotes are appropriate when:

• Giving a precise definition
• Saying something about the author’s language or style (e.g., in a literary analysis paper)
• Providing evidence in support of an argument
• Critiquing or analyzing a specific claim

A paraphrase puts a specific passage into your own words. It’s typically a similar length to the original text, or slightly shorter.

When you boil a longer piece of writing down to the key points, so that the result is a lot shorter than the original, this is called summarizing .

Paraphrasing and quoting are important tools for presenting specific information from sources. But if the information you want to include is more general (e.g., the overarching argument of a whole article), summarizing is more appropriate.

When paraphrasing, you have to be careful to avoid accidental plagiarism .

This can happen if the paraphrase is too similar to the original quote, with phrases or whole sentences that are identical (and should therefore be in quotation marks). It can also happen if you fail to properly cite the source.

Paraphrasing tools are widely used by students, and can be especially useful for non-native speakers who may find academic writing particularly challenging. While these can be helpful for a bit of extra inspiration, use these tools sparingly, keeping academic integrity in mind.

To make sure you’ve properly paraphrased and cited all your sources, you could elect to run a plagiarism check before submitting your paper. And of course, always be sure to read your source material yourself and take the first stab at paraphrasing on your own.

If you want to know more about ChatGPT, AI tools , citation , and plagiarism , make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples.

• ChatGPT vs human editor
• ChatGPT citations
• Is ChatGPT trustworthy?
• Using ChatGPT for your studies
• What is ChatGPT?
• Chicago style
• Critical thinking

 Plagiarism

• Types of plagiarism
• Self-plagiarism
• Avoiding plagiarism
• Academic integrity
• Consequences of plagiarism
• Common knowledge

To paraphrase effectively, don’t just take the original sentence and swap out some of the words for synonyms. Instead, try:

• Reformulating the sentence (e.g., change active to passive , or start from a different point)
• Combining information from multiple sentences into one
• Leaving out information from the original that isn’t relevant to your point
• Using synonyms where they don’t distort the meaning

The main point is to ensure you don’t just copy the structure of the original text, but instead reformulate the idea in your own words.

Paraphrasing without crediting the original author is a form of plagiarism , because you’re presenting someone else’s ideas as if they were your own.

However, paraphrasing is not plagiarism if you correctly cite the source . This means including an in-text citation and a full reference, formatted according to your required citation style .

As well as citing, make sure that any paraphrased text is completely rewritten in your own words.

Plagiarism means using someone else’s words or ideas and passing them off as your own. Paraphrasing means putting someone else’s ideas in your own words.

So when does paraphrasing count as plagiarism?

• Paraphrasing is plagiarism if you don’t properly credit the original author.
• Paraphrasing is plagiarism if your text is too close to the original wording (even if you cite the source). If you directly copy a sentence or phrase, you should quote it instead.
• Paraphrasing  is not plagiarism if you put the author’s ideas completely in your own words and properly cite the source .

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To present information from other sources in academic writing , it’s best to paraphrase in most cases. This shows that you’ve understood the ideas you’re discussing and incorporates them into your text smoothly.

It’s appropriate to quote when:

• Changing the phrasing would distort the meaning of the original text
• You want to discuss the author’s language choices (e.g., in literary analysis )
• You’re presenting a precise definition
• You’re looking in depth at a specific claim

Cite this Scribbr article

If you want to cite this source, you can copy and paste the citation or click the “Cite this Scribbr article” button to automatically add the citation to our free Citation Generator.

Gahan, C. & Caulfield, J. (2023, June 01). How to Paraphrase | Step-by-Step Guide & Examples. Scribbr. Retrieved April 15, 2024, from https://www.scribbr.com/working-with-sources/how-to-paraphrase/

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