Writing original high quality articles for a blog is frustrating work. Especially for those with English as their second language. I also come from a blogger community that struggles to write articles effectively.
The difficulty in writing original content without holding an extensive writing experience could quickly become a headache for new bloggers, both native or non-native alike. I personally struggled a lot at the beginning when I started out my first niche site.
Although my writing skills have improved to some extent, still thinking about composing a new article always hit me with that age-old writer’s block. So I am going to discuss the methods and techniques that I have been personally using for myself to write blog posts for my niche sites.
The rewriting techniques that I am going to share today have helped me not only to improve my content writing skill but self-confidence as well. Now I can confidently write on any given topic without worrying about the possible plagiarism while researching the source materials.
Rewriting or paraphrasing are not exclusive to non-native writers, but it’s rather a collection of comprehensive writing methods that are being used by natives as well, especially by the news editors all around the globe.
Therefore, you can think of rewriting or summarizing from others’ work as a normal part of the content writing profession. In fact most professional content writers and bloggers often depend on these rewriting techniques to compose original & high-quality articles.
Think for a moment, the internet of today is overfilled with information. There is nothing you can come up with anymore that is a totally unique piece of content. Every topic you can possibly think of has already been written extensively.
Maybe not in a blog post or an article but anywhere on the internet. From a forum, books, or even online videos, information in the 21st century is simply overflowing through the internet.
So the next time you are going to write something quality and informative, please don’t trigger the perfectionist in you. With that being said, let’s start with the available options you have when sitting down to write a good quality article.
- Do your own original research and write.
- Rewrite the available information in your own words.
Pros & Cons Of Rewriting Articles From Other Sources
Despite the efficiency of rewriting or paraphrasing techniques, it has its own set of pros & cons. Sometimes you will find an abundance of information related to your writing topic and sometimes not so much.
In other words, you get more dependent on the availability of original sources. If the original sources contain valuable information and statistics, then more likely your rewritten content would also inherently hold the same value.
On the contrary, if you are going to write content based on your own research then maybe the final result would not hold the same weight as others. Also, it usually takes a much longer time to produce such a unique piece of content.
Sometimes as a content writer or blogger you might also need to write on topics that you have little to no knowledge of. Thus, the quality of your content ultimately relies on your expertise on the topic.
Therefore, average bloggers like you and I can not put the effort, time & energy into producing such content. The rewriting technique is our only bet. But it’s also like playing with a double edged sword. Because doing it improperly could lead to the violation of copyright infringement, which is an invitation of manual penalty from Google.
So, there are actually two ways to rewrite an article from another source:
- Automatic way (using an online tool such as article spinner)
- Manual way (entirely written by a real human being)
Automatic Way Of Producing Content
The automatic way of producing content is called spinning an article. There are a lot of online tools available just to do this task. Few of them are free and others allow the advanced features for only their paid plans.
There are mainly two ways of how these tools work. All you need to do is feed the tool with the original source content and it will spin some words here & there to produce technically unique content. But remember, these tools don’t add any additional value to the end result.
Disadvantages Of Using Content Spinning Tools
Using these tools comes with a huge downside. That is almost all of the time, the results delivered by these tools contain unnatural sentence structures and punctuation that are unreadable for humans.
These tools are often used by spammy bloggers. You might have come across such sites before. Where you can clearly notice that something is off in their writings. The worst part of using such tools is that google can easily catch those spammy contents and block them from getting ranked in its search results.
Because Google has an unlimited resource and powerful supercomputers with cutting edge machine learning algorithms that effortlessly identify these spun & twisted articles from another source.
Advantages Of Using Spinning Tools
To maximize the effectiveness of using such tools, many bloggers use another clever method. After the content spinning tool produces the result, they give it a human touch by manually editing and fixing the content.
It somehow eliminates the errors and neutralizes the artificial sentence structure & punctuation problem of such tools. So that audience can read the content smoothly. Content produced this way is much harder for Google, and even for humans to identify it as computer generated.
Although this type of content mostly doesn’t perform well on search and often gets penalized by Google if caught. So the moral of the story is, using these content spinning tools is not a good idea. Even serious bloggers with long term visions don’t consider this option as an option.
Manual Way Of Rewriting Article
This is a completely different story altogether. Rewriting articles from others’ contents has been used for decades, mostly by news reporters. In news articles, you can see the main facts of the news remain the same.
However, hundreds of articles are being written using the same information, facts, and statistical data over & over again. But all in different orders and with different contexts surrounding those original facts.
Rewriting articles this way has no violation of copyright infringement. Hence making it very effective for bloggers and content writers to write unique articles without investing a lot of time into the in-depth original research.
All you need to do is copy the ideas, concepts, and facts from the original source. Then essentially condensing them into outlines, and rewriting in your point of view. Your task is to produce the content as unique as possible even though the fundamental concepts on the subject are the same.
You must do it by putting your own perspective into the writing. For example, if I were to write a blog post on a product review, then the chances are you wouldn’t find any factual data that is completely different from others.
Because essentially the product is the same and so is the factual data about it. The main difference you would notice is the perspective of reviewing that product and the presentation of the data is varying from one writer to another.
Performance Of Rewritten Articles In Google Search Ranking
One of the dark secrets of the internet today is that very few bloggers and content writers actually put the time and effort into creating unique and original pieces of content.
Most bloggers don’t have the capacity or the money to invest in such rigorous research for writing blog content that can only be monetized with display ads or affiliate sponsored links.
Now the main question becomes, whether this style of rewriting content could rank on google search or not? – The obvious answer to this question is YES.
You see the main difficulty with this technique is that the main original source is still out there on the internet, from where you just have copied the informational data and integrated it into your writings.
So to outrank the original post by the new one, you either have to add significantly more information or you can write on an entirely new topic but using the original source material to guide you through.
This way the freshly written content will be entirely unique and still hold the same quality as the original source. However, you should always verify the source to be as detailed as possible.
Because if you start off by a source that itself is a rewritten work of someone, then your content will be less effective and won’t provide any additional value. So, let’s summarize the discussion into five easy to remember tips, which you can follow the next time when rewriting articles from others’ content.
Tips #1 Copy Concepts Not Words
One of the most important things to understand is that rewriting is all about taking inspiration and ideas from others’ sources, not stealing them.
Read the source material a few times to get a good grasp of the concept before starting to rewrite. Once you understand the core idea behind the source content, it will become much easier for you to write your own version of the idea as well.
Tip #2 Don’t Use Content Spinner Unless You Need It
Online content spinner tools do more harm than good. Your site might get penalized by Google if you get caught. Many bloggers are shamelessly promoting such tools for their sole benefit of sweet affiliate commissions. You should avoid such promotions.
If english is your second language then invest in a good grammar checker tool; such as Grammarly. I use it every day and highly recommend this tool. You can read the full review of Grammarly here.
Tip #3 Use As Much Source Material As You Can
There will be a significant difference if you use more than one original source of information as the base for your writings. The more data you have in your hand the better the result will be.
So it’s a good idea not to rely on just one source, rather collect as many articles or contents you can find on the internet and use them all to write your article.
Tip# 4 Do Not Copy The Bullet Points
It’s pretty obvious that when you use other’s content as the base for your writing then some headings and bullet points will also be carried over to your writing. Therefore, always write your article from a different point of view than the original source.
This way you can easily differentiate your work from the original, and don’t forget to include more data or facts if needed. Add additional points and your ideas into the writing to make sure you are not just rewriting but improving over the old content.
Tip# 5 Don’t Rewrite Sentence By Sentence
This is a common mistake many bloggers make. They tend to start rewriting the source content sentence by sentence. This is a big red warning sign.
When you rewrite a content sentence by sentence, you will be more likely to use a similar set of words as the source material. Which will make your content look the same as the original.
This is what we are avoiding to happen. Instead, you should rewrite paragraph by paragraph. It would reduce the possibility of accidentally duplicating their prose or specific word choices.
Final Thoughts
Rewriting content is not like traditional writing where you use the brain a lot. You will get used to it after creating enough content for yourself. You can certainly improve content quality by practicing and creating more content.
Rewriting is still used by millions of content & copywriters every day. When done correctly no one can identify your content as a rewritten work of another content. I use these mentioned tips myself to make sure my rewriting is unique, original and provides value to my readers. Your job is to do the same.
