What is a Paraphrase?
Paraphrase Definition
By Matthew
A paraphrase is a rewording of an original text, such as a document, essay, paragraph, or sentence, that retains the meaning of the original text while rephrasing its surface structure.
There are three many types of paraphrases:
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Phrase Variation refers to altering one phrase to another by changing the grammar or placement of elements in the sentence.
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Example: There must be a new way of rewriting content if we are to succeed in our paraphrasing effort.
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Paraphrase: If we are to be successful at paraphrasing, we need to have a new way of rewriting content.
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Notice that in this paraphrase example, the grammar is changed substantially, with some verbs shifting to adjectives, and the subject shifting from ‘way’ to ‘we,’ making the sentence clearer.
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Using Synonyms refers to substituting some words with other words that mean the same thing.
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Example: The essay rewriter needed to paraphrase the documents.
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Paraphrase: The essay rewriter needed to rephrase the documents.
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Note that in the above example of paraphrase, only one word changes, paraphrase -> rephrase. Although there are good synonyms and synonyms are often important, their use represents the most superficial changes to a text.
For more on this point, check out our article on our sentence thesaurus.
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Figurative to Literal Rephrasing is when you take a phrase that is in some sense metaphorical and reword it into something literal.
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Example: He didn’t want to boil the ocean.
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Paraphrase: He didn’t want to attempt to achieve more than was possible.
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Literal to Figurative Rephrasing is when you take a phrase that is literal and rephrase it as something metaphorical.
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Example: The character in the film passed away.
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Paraphrase: The character in the film kicked the bucket.
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These categories come from The Art of Paraphrase, written by the rhetorical scholar and professor, Frank D’Angelo.
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To get the most out of your writing, try our paraphrasing tool.
To learn more, check out this paraphrase how to guide; it's always good to see examples of paraphrase, so you know what to expect.
About Paraphrase Tool
Getting your wording just right
Paraphrasing is a natural part of the writing process as it helps you clarify your thinking and suit your words to your audience. Using a Paraphrase Tool helps structure and streamline this work, and our paraphrase tool offers 20 modes, many of them free, for accomplishing just this. The 20 modes we offer are diverse, including a summarize tool, a free grammar checker, a mode to simplify text, and a sentence shortener. There are sentence rephrasers and paraphrase rephrase tools, and we pride ourselves on having both, since our reword generator accounts for context at both the sentence and paragraph levels.
When you google paraphrase you will get a variety of results, from a free Paraphrase Tool, to an article spinner, to a general phrase tool, and it can be hard to determine which of these rephrase tools will best help you complete your work. If you simply need to get a word rephrase, that is, reword only small elements within the sentence, many tools will suffice, but there is the risk that you end up with a tool that does not consider context and produces very awkward and ungrammatical sentences. Rephrasing is very much an art, and we’ve built our paraphrase bot to produce the most correct results in 20 modes in over 100 languages, making it the best paraphrasing tool at an exceptionally low cost. So whether you need to paraphrase deutsch, paraphrase greek, or paraphrase bahasa melayu, the next time you think, I need something to paraphrase this for me, you’ll know where to turn.
From keywords to paragraphs
Generating paragraphs with unique ideas can be challenging, and too often writers get stuck at this stage of the writing process. With our paragraph tool, you can enter keywords and let our AI generate paragraphs for you, so that you can have something to work with, refine the output, and become more engaged in your writing.
A paragraph generator creates links between your ideas, such that the output is sensible, unique, and stimulating, very close to what you would expect a thoughtful human paragraph writer to produce.
Paragraph makers are nice, but what about a short story generator? Because our AI is generalized, it serves a story generator, an essay generator, a poem generator, and much more. To generate compelling stories, you should provide the story generator with useful keywords from which it can develop plot elements, including characters, setting details, and any situational information. To generate reasonably good essays, you should likewise provide the essay maker with details around argumentative positions and any other pertinent ideas. If you more specifically want an introduction paragraph generator or conclusion paragraph generator, you can provide starter text and keywords that will best enable our essay creator to produce them.
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You may have professional needs for creating paragraphs as well, such as those needed for cover letter. Most of the time a cover letter template includes information that is not relevant to you; by using your own keywords, we can produce cover letter examples that are relevant to your use case and often require very little editing. By using this service, you can also learn how to write a cover letter and achieve the cover letter format you need.
Plagiarism checker free
Like everything else on our site, you can check plagiarism free within a trial, which is a great opportunity for those who want to check a paper for plagiarism without committing to paying before they see results. This free plagiarism checker is great for students and clearly indicates how to check for plagiarism by highlighting areas of similarity between the two texts. Just to be sure you are not accidentally plagiarizing, be sure to check all of your paraphrases as well.