Blog
Academic writing, AI detection, citation styles, and paraphrasing - how the tools work, what the research says, and where they get it wrong.
September 8, 2026 · 6 min read
Why AI Detectors Flag Non-Native English Writers
Writing in a second language produces the same statistical signature detectors use to identify machine text - simpler vocabulary, steadier rhythm, more learned connectives. This is the field's central fairness problem. Here is why it happens, what our own measured rate is, and what to do when it is you.
Read moreSeptember 8, 2026 · 5 min read
Which Words Do You Capitalise in a Title?
APA, MLA and Chicago give three different answers, and the difference is not trivia - it decides whether you write "Between" or "between" in the same title. Here is the actual rule for each, the four traps that catch people, and the handful of words no converter can decide for you.
Read moreSeptember 8, 2026 · 6 min read
What Reading Level Should Your Essay Be?
Readability formulas give your writing a school-year number, and the number is easy to misread. Here is what a good score actually looks like for academic work, why lower is not better, and which of the six formulas to trust when they disagree.
Read moreSeptember 8, 2026 · 7 min read
Is Using AI to Fix Your Grammar Cheating?
Two different questions get tangled together here - whether it breaks your institution's rules, and whether it will get your essay flagged. They have different answers, and knowing which one you are actually worried about is most of the problem.
Read moreSeptember 8, 2026 · 6 min read
Does Proofreading Your Essay Make It Look AI-Written?
Yes, measurably - and we have the paired numbers. Running 456 identical student essays through a proofreader and scoring them before and after roughly tripled the false-flag rate on an older version of our own detector. Here is what we measured, why it happens, and what we changed.
Read moreAugust 11, 2026 · 9 min read
Flagged as AI When You Wrote Every Word
An AI score is a probability, not a finding, and honest writing gets caught by it for reasons that have nothing to do with honesty. Here is what actually drives a false flag, what counts as evidence that you wrote your own work, and how to handle the conversation if it happens to you.
Read moreAugust 11, 2026 · 9 min read
A 1% False Positive Rate Is Not Small
The headline accuracy figure on an AI writing detector answers a different question from the one a teacher is actually asking. Here is the arithmetic that converts a vendor's error rate into the number of your own students it will wrongly flag, why the rate gets worse as your class gets more honest, and what a defensible process looks like.
Read moreAugust 6, 2026 · 5 min read
What Lexical Diversity Actually Measures (and When to Ignore It)
Lexical diversity scores claim to tell you how varied your vocabulary is. The simple version of the measure is badly broken by document length, which is why a long essay always scores worse than a short one. Here is what the numbers mean and what they miss.
Read moreAugust 6, 2026 · 6 min read
How to Paraphrase Properly (Most Advice Gets This Wrong)
Swapping words for synonyms is not paraphrasing - it is the thing that gets flagged. Real paraphrasing means understanding a passage well enough to rebuild it from its meaning rather than its sentence shape. Here is the difference, with worked examples.
Read moreAugust 6, 2026 · 5 min read
How to Cite AI-Generated Content in APA, MLA and Chicago
All three major style guides now have rules for citing a chatbot, and they disagree about what one even is. Here are the current formats, plus the disclosure question that matters more than the formatting.
Read moreAugust 6, 2026 · 6 min read
APA vs MLA vs Chicago - Which Citation Style, and Why It Differs
The three main citation styles are not arbitrary house rules. Each puts different information first because each was designed for a different kind of reader. Understanding why makes the formatting rules much easier to remember.
Read moreAugust 4, 2026 · 12 min read
How AI Detectors Work (and Where They Get It Wrong)
AI detectors do not recognise writing as machine-made. They measure how predictable it is, how much its rhythm varies, and how closely it matches patterns learned from millions of examples - then convert that into a probability. Here is what actually happens inside one, and why the number is a signal rather than a verdict.
Read moreJuly 29, 2026 · 5 min read
How to Extract Text From an Image (and When OCR Will Let You Down)
Getting text out of a screenshot or scanned page takes seconds - if the image is good enough. Here is how to give OCR the best chance, why the output arrives with odd line breaks, and the cases where it will simply fail.
Read moreJuly 28, 2026 · 5 min read
Why Your Writing Sounds Repetitive (and How to Fix It Without a Thesaurus)
Repetitive prose is usually not a vocabulary problem. It is repeated sentence openers, transition crutches, and uniform sentence length - and reaching for a thesaurus makes all three worse. Here is what to fix instead.
Read moreJuly 28, 2026 · 5 min read
How to Find a Free, Legal PDF of a Research Paper
You hit a paywall on a paper you need. There is usually a legal free copy somewhere - a preprint, a repository version, or an open-access edition. Here is where to look, in the order that works fastest.
Read moreJuly 28, 2026 · 5 min read
How to Cite a Website With No Author or Date (APA, MLA, Chicago)
Missing a byline or a publication date? Here is exactly what goes in the author and date slots for APA 7, MLA 9, and Chicago author-date - plus how to check whether the author really is missing before you give up on it.
Read moreJuly 28, 2026 · 5 min read
How Many Words Is a 5-Minute Speech? (A Chart for Every Length)
A 5-minute speech is roughly 650 words at a normal speaking pace. Here is the word count for every common talk length, what shifts your own rate, and how to measure it in two minutes instead of guessing.
Read moreJuly 26, 2026 · 2 min read
Our AI Detector Is Out of Beta - Free and Built for Academic Writing
The PT Technologies AI Detector has left beta. It is free with a free account, scans up to 10,000 characters, and now exports a full PDF report - and it is trained specifically on academic writing.
Read moreJuly 6, 2026 · 5 min read
How Our Paraphraser Performs - A Hands-On Look
A walkthrough of how our Paraphraser handles a real passage, the method we used to compare it against other tools, and - more usefully - how to run that comparison yourself instead of taking anyone's word for it.
Read moreJune 9, 2026 · 1 min read
Welcome to the PT Technologies Blog
A quick hello, and a look at what we're building - simple writing and document tools made for people.
Read moreJune 8, 2026 · 5 min read
Paraphrasing Without Losing Your Citations
Rewriting a flat draft is easy. Keeping every citation attached to the claim it actually supports is the part that goes wrong, and the worst version of it is invisible - the reference is still there, just pointing at the wrong sentence.
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