Which Paraphrasing Tool is best for Academic Writing?

Academic writing…is pretty straightforward while at the same time, it can be quite complicated. Essentially, you just have to write down the results of your experiments or provide evidence to prove or disprove something.

The hard part is articulating all of that well enough that many people are able to understand it. Another thing that makes it harder is that your work cannot be similar to another person’s work.

A common technique that people use to deal with both of these things is paraphrasing. Paraphrasing is the art of saying/writing something using completely different wording without changing the actual meaning.

Now that writing is more widespread, there are numerous tools and technologies that have been developed to facilitate it. In this article, we will discuss paraphrasing tools in relation to academic writing.

Techniques of Paraphrasing

The first thing you need to know about paraphrasing is how to do it. There are a few techniques for paraphrasing and they are listed below.

· Synonym Exchange
In this technique, the writer picks out some words from the text, and simply replaces them with their synonym. The synonym must be contextually correct as well. This technique is not that good on its own. It is best used in tandem with other techniques.

Example:

Original:

This is a delicious meal.

Synonym Exchanged:

This is a scrumptious meal

· Phrase Exchange
In this technique, the writer replaces phrases with synonymous phrases. The thing is that phrase exchange can be used to replace words too. The same is true for synonym exchange which can replace phrases as well.

Example:

Original:

She sat in the darkened room waiting.

Phrase Exchanged:

She sat in the dimly lit room and waited.

· Change Voice/Sentence Structure
This is a technique in which sentences in active voice are changed to passive voice and vice versa. Changing voices involves altering the sentence structure as well. You can change the sentence structure without altering the voice as well.

Example:

Original:

The cat rolled the ball of yarn.

Voice/Structure Changed:

The ball of yarn was rolled by the cat.

· Change Word Order or Form
Changing the word form or shuffling the words around also works well for paraphrasing. This changes the physical structure of the sentence, and that means you have to make other changes to accommodate them.

Using multiple paraphrasing techniques together is the most effective way of paraphrasing. Just using one technique is never good enough because it barely changes the text.

Example:

Original:

This is quite a delicious meal

Word Order Changed:

Quite a delicious, meal this is.

Importance of Paraphrasing Tools in Academic Writing

Paraphrasing tools are able to utilize all of the previously described techniques effectively. Nowadays, most paraphrasing tools are powered by artificial intelligence. This makes them quite good at recognizing what parts of a text can be paraphrased or not.

In academic writing, paraphrasing is necessary for a few things:

• Using large passages from a source
• Avoiding plagiarism when using public domain information
• Reducing the difficulty of reading the write-up

These are some of the things that academic writers have to take care of. In most research papers (the classic example of academic writing), people have to include a “Related Works” or “Literature Review” section. In these sections, they have to briefly explain what other works have been done by people with regard to the research paper topic.

Almost all of this section consists of paraphrased text from other sources that have been summarized so that they fit into one section. Additionally, at the end of a paper, the discussion section goes over the entire paper and discusses what the results mean in relation to the topic. This section is written by paraphrasing and summarizing most of the paper as well.

Since there is so much writing to paraphrase, paraphrasing tools are the best bet for academic writers.

Comparison of Well-Known Paraphrasing Tools

In this section, we are going to check out three of the best-known paraphrasing tools and compare them. By the end of this section, we will have a clear winner and that will be the best paraphrasing tool for academic writing.

The tools we will discuss are:

• Quillbot
• io
• Wordtune

Now, let’s check them all out.

1. Quillbot

Quillbot is actually an online toolkit that provides multiple content optimization tools. However, its main offering is the paraphrasing tool. The Quillbot has a lot to offer. For starters, it has seven paraphrasing modes to choose from. Out of the seven two are free, while the rest are paywalled.

Quillbot is freemium tool. Its free features can be used without an account. So, how good is it for academic writing? Well, we will answer that after testing it out with an excerpt from our blog.

Quillbot highlights all the changes it makes by coloring them in different colors. Each color represents a different sort of change.

• Blue words are the longest unchanged words.
• Orange signifies changed words.
• Yellow underlines show structural changes.

You can also see the total sentence and word count of the output. The Quillbot is excellent as we can see it has intelligently rephrased the content. It uses words that are appropriate, powerful, and easy to understand.

It can be easily used for avoiding quoting large passages and paraphrasing them instead. The only thing that can be considered a drawback is that it is quite expensive, and the free features are very limited.

All premium packages offer the same features, which are as follows:

• Unlocks all paraphrasing mode
• Gives more options for changing synonyms
• No word limits
• More queries per month

There are other features too, but they are related to other tools instead of the paraphrasing tool.

1. Paraphrase Online

Paraphrase Online is a tool specifically dedicated to paraphrasing. This paraphrasing tool is trained on advanced AI algorithms to smartly rephrase the content like humans.

The best thing about Paraphrase Online is that it is completely free. All of its paraphrasing modes are available to the user right from the get-go. On top of that, the paraphraser by Paraphrase Online does not require the user to create an account either. It supports multiple languages.

It provides 4 AI modes for paraphrasing which are:

• Word Changer
• Sentence Rephraser
• Paraphrase Text
• Text Improver

So, how good is it for academic writing? Well, let’s find out.

In the attached image, we can see that this paraphrase tool has made quite a bit of change to the text. All the changes are written in bold characters.

You can see that if you click on any of the bold words, a list of synonyms shows up. You can use this list to replace the word with another one of your choices.

The paraphrasing tool by Paraphrase Online also has a large word count which is 2,500 words. That is more than enough to paraphrase an entire section of a research paper, or a white paper. Pair this with other small features of the tool such as options to upload files of multiple formats, and download the output, and you get yourself a solid paraphraser.

Pricing

Paraphrase Online is a completely free tool.

2. Wordtune

Wordtune is a writing assisting tool that has a very capable paraphraser as well. It is not like the other tools on this list that are dedicated to paraphrasing. Instead, what you get is an editor.

The editor provides you with different suggestions to improve the text. Most of these “improvements” are done by paraphrasing the text. You can do it manually as well. To manually paraphrase the text, you have to select the sentences you want to rephrase and Wordtune will automatically ask you about it. You can confirm the decision and it will rephrase the selected text.

As you can see, there are actually multiple suggestions offered by the paraphraser. The changes in each suggestion are colored indigo. You can apply these changes to the text automatically, or manually.

The drawbacks of this tool are that you do not have any selectable modes. What this does is that users have to scroll through all the suggestions and select a suitable one themselves.

Another thing is that this tool cannot be used without an account. And even after creating an account, you cannot use this tool too many times for free. You get approximately, 10 rephrases per day which is a very small amount.

Comparison of all Three Paraphrasers

Enrollment in local colleges, 2005

	Quillbot	Paraphrase Online	Wordtune	Best
	A	B	C
Word Limit (Free)	125	2,500	10 sentences	B
Paraphrasing Modes	Seven	Four	None	A
Languages Supported	One	Multiple	Eight	B
Account required for more features	Yes	No	Yes	B
Premium upgrade required for more features	Yes	no	Yes	B

Based on this data, we can safely say that for English academic writers, Paraphrase Online is the best tool to use for their academic writing. It offers a healthy mix of features and accessibility. The other tools do offer a lot of features, but they are not very accessible as they require premium upgrades to make the most of them. That is not the case with Paraphrase Online.

Conclusion

In this article, we have looked at what is paraphrasing, some techniques for paraphrasing, and some tools as well.

We looked at the features of each paraphrasing tool as well. All of the tools provide great features and are effective at paraphrasing. However, after comparison, and keeping user comfort in mind, we have declared Paraphrase Online as the best tool for academic writing.