How to Rewrite an Essay in Your Own Words?
There are many different reasons and purposes for which you may need to rewrite an essay in your own words. You may be looking to improve the quality of your essay, or you may be looking to reuse it somewhere else but with different words.
Whatever the motive may be, you need to know how you can rewrite an essay effectively in your own words. That is what our blog post will be covering today.
What is essay rewriting?
Before we get to the whole “how to” part, let’s actually take a look at what essay rewriting is.
In a nutshell, essay rewriting can be defined as:
“The process in which an essay is reworded or rewritten with different changes such as synonymizing and modifying the shape/structure of the sentences. During this process, the meaning and core concept of the essay has to be maintained.”
Rewriting is essentially a process that is practiced on all types of content for different reasons. For example, bloggers and webmasters may find themselves having to rewrite their website content. Students, on the other hand, can find themselves having to rewrite assignments, theses, and, of course, essays.
Although we can’t really exemplify “essay rewriting” since we can’t just put a whole essay here, we can look at what the changes that make up the process look like on a smaller piece of content:
What is the purpose of rewriting essays?
There are different reasons why essays can be rewritten. We will discuss some of the main purposes in the section below:
1. To improve the essay’s quality
One of the main purposes that rewriting can serve is to bring an improvement in the quality of the write-up. Oftentimes, the first draft of the essay can be clunky in places. In other places, it may be riddled with errors or mistakes.
During the rewriting phase, these errors and imperfections can be detected and removed. Of course, it depends on what aspect you’re focusing on when rewriting. You could, for example, look for and fix the following types of issues in your content:
- Long and complex sentences
- Difficult words
- Badly formed sentences
And so on.
2. To reuse the essay in a different place
It is common for students to be assigned an essay and then get a similar one assigned some time later. In situations like this, they may need to reuse some parts of their older essays to save time and effort.
As long as the instructions are clear in this regard, there is nothing wrong with reusing and repurposing the essay. And one of the easiest ways to do that is to rewrite it.
When an essay is rewritten, it gets worded differently than what it originally was. Once the wording and phrasing are changed, there are no self-plagiarism issues that you have to worry about.
3. To eliminate accidental plagiarism
A lot of times, when someone writes an essay, it comes back with accidental plagiarism. Since there are a lot of articles, books, blogs, etc., published on the Internet, there is always a chance of someone to come up with sentences and even passages that have been written by another author.
While there is no problem with such accidental plagiarism occurring, there is definitely a problem in letting such plagiarism get by and staying in the last draft.
Eliminating this type of plagiarism is also one of the main reasons that students and writers can rewrite their essays.
Is rewriting essays legal?
Yes, rewriting essays is generally fine and legal. However, there are a few situations in which it becomes unethical and illegal.
Essay rewriting is basically done in two main settings.
- One is the rewriting in which a person rewrites their own essay for better clarity and to eliminate plagiarism, etc., for reasons we mentioned above. In this type of rewriting, there are no worries involved about gaining permission, etc.
- The other type of rewriting is that when someone rewrites an essay written by someone else
How do you effectively rewrite essays in your own words?
Now that we have discussed all the peripheral information pertaining to essay rewriting above, let’s take a look at how you can effectively rewrite essays. We’ll break the process up into easily followable steps:
1. Reading and understanding the essay
The first step of rewriting an essay is to carefully read it. Rewriting an essay means primarily to reword it without changing its main meaning. And that is only possible to do if you know what the meaning actually is.
To get a good grasp of the overall meaning, tone, and context of the essay, you just need to read it a couple of times – preferably giving some time between each of the reading sessions.
It can also be a good idea to write down the main takeaways of the essay in points so that you can quickly tally them. That way, when you rewrite the essay, you will be able to easily check whether or not all the points are present in the altered version.
2. Look for the parts that you cannot change
The next thing that you have to do is identify the parts in the essay that you cannot change. There will be some parts that don’t have any possible replacements – such as technical explanations and proper nouns, etc.
When you start rewriting the essay in a flow, you will be able to avoid these parts and make sure you don’t change anything that doesn’t have to be changed.
3. Start making the changes | Synonymizing and Altering Sentence Structures
The next step in the process is to start making the changes.
In the essay rewriting process, there are basically two main types of changes that you can make to the text:
- Synonymizing
- Changing sentence structures
Synonymizing is pretty simple in itself. It basically means that you replace the words in the essay with other suitable synonyms. During the whole rewriting process, adding the synonyms is perhaps the most drastic change that you can make. While the sentence structure alteration enhances the overall changes, the main change is the synonym-swapping.
And by “sentence structure alteration” that we have just referred to, we mean making changes like breaking or merging sentences, changing active voice to passive, changing the tenses, and so on.
When these two changes are made together, the essay gets rewritten. We want to give you a demonstration here, but since we can’t use an entire essay, we’ll stick to using a passage instead.
The studies pertaining to the patterns in crime would show that, quite often, violence perpetrated had no rationale – even not the twisted one concomitant to criminals. The acts done by the Manson family, for example, were the products of reasoning so diabolical that no amount of comprehension can make any sense of it.
The research germane to the patterns in crime would show that violence usually had no rationale. Not even the twisted sense that is expected of criminals. For example, the crimes committed by the Manson family were utterly diabolical and cannot be understood no matter how hard it is tried.
4. Check and Edit the Output
The last step of the rewriting process is checking the rewritten content to ensure that it does not contain any errors or imperfections. When we say “errors” and “imperfections,” it means a little differently than a normal proofreading session done on normal content.
When you rewrite something and then later check it, your priority is to look for factual or contextual issues. In other words, you have to see if the rewriting process has brought any conceptual or contextual changes in the text or not. You also have to check for any added or omitted details because additions and omissions are both not supposed to happen in rewriting.
Of course, other than this, you should also do the standard stuff, i.e., checking for grammar errors, spelling mistakes, readability issues, and the like.
How to use online essay changers?
Now that we’ve chalked out the basic process above, let’s talk a bit about online essay changes or essay rewriters.
An essay rewriter is basically an online tool that is programmed to make changes in a piece of provided content while conserving the meaning. The changes made are the same type of changes that we’ve talked about above, i.e., synonymizing and sentence structure alteration.
Here is an example of what this tool can look like:
In the whole process that we’ve described above, i.e., the reading, changing, and proofreading steps, you can use an essay rewriter in the middle phase. You can, in other words, use the tool to make the actual changes in order to save time.
You can then proofread the text later on to make sure there are no issues and errors in it.
Final Thoughts
Rewriting an essay in your own words is something that you can be required to do for different reasons and purposes. You may have to get rid of some accidental plagiarism or you may be looking to just improve the quality of the text, etc.
The process of rewriting itself is simple and easy. We have described the main steps in the post above. We have also talked about how using an essay changer can be a good way to make the process easier.
