How to check an AI rewrite before you hand it in

A rewrite reads well, and that is exactly why it needs checking. Smooth prose hides small changes. A number that moved by four, a “however” that vanished, a sentence that was quietly dropped: none of these make the paragraph read worse. All of them can make it wrong, and the name at the top of the paper is yours.

This applies to any rewriting, by a person, a paraphrasing program or a tool like ours. Our rewriter is free to change wording, order and structure, and nothing in it verifies the result against your draft. Checking is your job, and it takes ten minutes if you know what to look for.

What to check, in order of damage

1. Numbers. Every figure, percentage, unit and range. Search your draft for digits, then find each one in the rewrite. Watch for “about”, “nearly” and “over” appearing or disappearing next to a number.
2. Dates and sequence. Years, months and words such as “before”, “after”, “later” and “since”. Reordering sentences can reverse what happened first.
3. Names and terms. People, places, organisations, titles, and any technical term your field defines exactly. A synonym for an ordinary word is fine. A synonym for a defined term is a different claim.
4. Quotations. A quotation has to match its source word for word. A rewrite treats a quotation as text, so compare each one with the original source, not only with your draft, and put the exact words back.
5. Citations. Author, year and page in the text, and the reference list at the end. Confirm the rewrite did not merge two sources, attach a claim to the wrong one or introduce a source that you never used.
6. Qualifiers and connectives. Words that set how far a claim goes: “some”, “most”, “may”, “often”, “unless”, “although”, “however”. Dropping one turns a careful claim into a sweeping one, and dropping a “however” can turn a contrast into agreement.
7. Dropped sentences and ideas. Count the claims in your draft paragraph by paragraph and find each in the rewrite. A tidy rewrite is often a shorter one, and the missing sentence is often the one with the evidence in it.
8. Added claims. New adjectives, new causes, a conclusion that goes further than yours. Anything in the rewrite you cannot trace to your own draft has to be either cut or supported.

A worked example

Below is a short paragraph and a rewrite of it, both invented for this article. The town, the survey and the figures do not exist, and the second version is not the output of our tool or of any other. It is written to contain the slips described above, so you can practise finding them.

Read against the draft, the rewrite has six problems. None of them reads like an error.

• A number changed: 62 per cent became 66 per cent.
• A date changed: March 2027 became March 2026.
• A qualifier was lost: “although support fell to 41 per cent among people who drive to work every day” is gone, so “most residents back” now sounds universal.
• A quotation was altered: “costs us a full building season” became “a building season lost”, with the quotation marks still in place.
• A connective vanished: “However” introduced a contrast, and the rewrite joins the two sentences as though they simply followed each other.
• A sentence was dropped: the margin of error, which told the reader how much to trust the 62 per cent.

Every one of these would survive a read for style. Only a comparison with the original finds them.

What the highlighted words do and do not tell you

In the rewriter on our home page and in the dashboard, the rewrite is shown with every changed word marked in a highlighter tint, with a dotted underline so the mark does not depend on colour, and a line under the text saying how many of the words were changed from your draft. The marks come from a word-by-word comparison of your draft with the rewrite, in order, ignoring capitals and punctuation at the edges of a word. A word is marked when it is not one of the words kept from your draft.

That makes the marks a good aid for some checks and no help with others:

• Good for numbers, dates, names and quotations. If a figure in the rewrite is highlighted, it is not the figure in your draft. In the invented example, the changed number and the changed year are exactly the kind of word you would see marked. Work through every highlighted digit and proper noun first.
• No help with omissions. A sentence that was dropped leaves nothing in the rewrite to highlight. You find it by reading the draft, not by looking for marks.
• Silent about meaning. The marks say which words changed, not whether the sense survived. A marked synonym may be harmless. An unmarked word in a rearranged sentence may now mean something different.

Use them to decide where to look, and use your draft to decide what is true. Copying and downloading take the plain rewrite without marks, and there is a button to hide the highlights if you want to read it clean.

A ten-minute routine

1. Read the rewrite once for sense, without stopping.
2. Walk the highlighted words. Check every number, date, name and quotation.
3. Go through your draft, sentence by sentence, and tick each claim in the rewrite.
4. Search the rewrite for the qualifiers and connectives in the list above.
5. Restore anything that is wrong, in your own words, then read the whole thing aloud.

If your course asks you to disclose the use of a tool, this is also the moment to write the note; see how to read your course’s AI policy for how. And if what bothers you about a draft is that it sounds flat rather than wrong, fixing a stiff draft yourself walks through the edits by hand.