The standard advice on paraphrasing is to "put it in your own words." That instruction is not wrong, but it is so vague that most people implement it as replace some words with synonyms and move a clause, which is the one approach guaranteed to produce bad writing and, quite reasonably, to be treated as too close to the source.

Paraphrasing well is a comprehension skill, not a text-editing operation. Here is what the difference looks like in practice.

The test that actually matters

A paraphrase is adequate when someone reading it, and then reading the original, would say you understood the passage and expressed it yourself. It is inadequate when they would say you had the original open in front of you.

That test has nothing to do with how many individual words you changed. Consider this source sentence:

Rising sea temperatures have accelerated coral bleaching events across the Great Barrier Reef, with mass bleaching now occurring at intervals too short for full recovery.

Synonym-swapping produces:

Increasing ocean temperatures have hastened coral whitening incidents throughout the Great Barrier Reef, with widespread whitening now happening at gaps too brief for complete recuperation.

Almost every word changed. It is still the same sentence. The clause order, the grammatical structure, the sequence of ideas and the rhythm are all identical - and "recuperation" is worse English than "recovery." This is the version that gets flagged, and it deserves to be.

Actual paraphrasing produces something like:

Corals need time between bleaching events to recover. On the Great Barrier Reef, warmer water has made those events frequent enough that the recovery window has effectively closed.

Some words are shared - "bleaching", "recover", "Great Barrier Reef" - and they should be, because they are the correct technical terms and replacing them would be false precision. What changed is the structure: the second version leads with the biological mechanism and arrives at the reef as a consequence. That is only possible if you understood the point rather than the sentence.

How to actually do it

The method that works is inconvenient, which is why the synonym approach is so popular.

1. Read the passage, then look away from it. This single step does most of the work. If you cannot restate a passage without looking at it, you have not understood it well enough to paraphrase it, and no amount of word substitution will fix that.

2. Write what it meant, in the shape your own argument needs. Your paragraph has a job to do. The source sentence was written to do a different job in a different document. If your paraphrase has the same shape as the source, you have imported someone else's structure into your argument, which is usually why paraphrased paragraphs read like a lumpy list of other people's points.

3. Check back for accuracy, not for similarity. Return to the source and ask whether you have changed the claim. This is where most real damage happens - a hedge dropped, "some evidence suggests" becoming "research shows", a correlation quietly turned into a cause. Overstating a source is a more serious problem than a clumsy paraphrase, and far less likely to be caught.

4. Cite it. A paraphrase still needs a citation. This is the step people forget, and it is worth being blunt about: putting someone's idea in your own words without attribution is plagiarism just as much as copying their sentence. Changing the wording changes nothing about whose idea it is.

Keep the technical vocabulary

There is a persistent myth that a good paraphrase shares no words with the original. It is nonsense, and following it produces writing that is actively wrong.

If a source says myocardial infarction, your paraphrase says myocardial infarction or heart attack, depending on your audience. It does not say "cardiac muscle death episode." If a source discusses statistical significance, that phrase has a precise meaning and there is no synonym for it.

Technical terms, proper nouns, and established phrases in a field are shared vocabulary, not borrowed phrasing. Reaching for a thesaurus to avoid them is how you end up with prose that sounds like it was translated twice.

When to quote instead

Paraphrasing is the default in most academic writing, but not always the right move. Quote directly when:

The exact wording is the point. If you are analysing how something was said - a political speech, a poem, a legal judgment - paraphrasing destroys the evidence.
The phrasing is unusually precise or well-known. A definition that a field has settled on should be quoted and attributed, not reworded into something almost-but-not-quite right.
You are disagreeing with someone. If you are about to argue that an author is wrong, quote them. Paraphrasing an argument you intend to attack invites the response that you attacked a version of it that suits you.

The failure mode in the other direction is a paper that is 40% quotation, which reads as an anthology rather than an argument. If you cannot say what a quote is doing in your paragraph, paraphrase it or cut it.

Summarising is a different job

Paraphrasing and summarising get conflated constantly. A paraphrase is roughly the same length as the original and covers the same ground. A summary is much shorter and covers only what matters for your purposes.

Most of the time, students paraphrase where they should summarise. If you need one finding from a twelve-page paper, you do not need a faithful restatement of the paragraph it appeared in - you need one sentence saying what was found and one citation. Paragraph-by-paragraph paraphrasing of a source you only needed one number from is how literature reviews become unreadable.

What good paraphrasing looks like on the page

The tell of a well-paraphrased paragraph is that it reads in your voice, at your level of technicality, arranged to serve your point - with citations attached to specific claims rather than dropped at the end of the paragraph as a blanket.

The tell of a badly paraphrased one is uneven register: a passage that suddenly gets more formal, or reaches for vocabulary the rest of your writing does not use. That unevenness is usually a better signal that something was lifted than any similarity score.

If a draft feels lumpy in that way, reading it aloud finds it quickly. So does checking whether your own vocabulary is doing the work - our Lexical Diversity tool flags overused words and repeated sentence openers, which is often what is really wrong when a paragraph reads as stitched together.

And if a passage you have written reads stiffly and you want it to flow more naturally in your own voice, the Paraphraser rewrites text for clarity while keeping citations intact. Use it on your own writing to smooth it, not as a substitute for understanding a source - the understanding is the part that does the work.

How to Paraphrase Properly (Most Advice Gets This Wrong)