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Now playing: More Than Words Can Say by Alias
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In what situations would you need to rewrite an article? A couple that come to mind are:
1) You've purchased a PLR article and want to make it your own
2) You want to change up an article from your blog to get it ready for submission to an article directory
Let's look at #1 - rewriting PLR. PLR stands for Private Label Rights, and you can either use it as is (in which case the same article will likely show up unchanged on other sites as well) or you can rewrite it. PLR is generally sold in packs, and the same set of articles can be sold to hundreds of people.
You could just take the first sentence, rewrite it using synonyms, take the second sentence, rewrite it using synonyms, and so on. This may be enough to make it original, but it may not, if others do the same thing with it and happen to think like you. This is a situation where how much time you have measured against how important originality is in a particular instance will determine how deep you get into a rewrite.
As for #2 - rewriting your own content, you may want to take one of your blog posts and rewrite it for submission to Ezine Articles or another article directory. Is this really necessary? No, probably not. There is no duplicate content penalty that will apply in this situation, but you will want to wait until it gets indexed on your blog first. At that point, you could submit it as is.
If you do want to rewrite, though, the above method is probably sufficient, especially if the blog post was an original of yours to begin with.
Total spin
But what if, for whatever reason, you don't want anyone to be able to tell that article #2 is a spun version of article #1?
If this is your goal, taking the article sentence by sentence, or even paragraph by paragraph, and just switching words around isn't going to cut it. It will be obvious it's really the same article because the thoughts will still be in more or less the same order and the grammatical structure probably won't vary much.
What you need to do is read and reread article #1 until you thoroughly understand it. (If you wrote it yourself, this hopefully isn't a problem 
) Then pretend you're relating to a friend what you read, without referring to it. Talk about it as naturally as possible from your own, or simply from a different, perspective. Add more of your own thoughts. Delete sections or sentences that you didn't love the first time around.
Start somewhere in the middle. Develop the thoughts in a different order, although of course you still want it to have a coherent flow. If there's an anecdote in the article, come up with a different one. Or rather than using an anecdote at all, find a graphic that illustrates the point instead.
How about some examples?
Compare the following paragraphs:
Article #1 excerpt
You should talk about it as naturally as possible from your own perspective. Pretend you’re chatting to a friend about your topic. You can also use others' articles to inspire you and to help you confirm facts, but you definitely want to stay away from anything that comes close to plagiarism.
Article #2 excerpt
When you discuss your topic, it should be from your own point of view. Just imagine yourself talking to a buddy about the subject. Also, articles other people have written can give you ideas and help you in fact-finding, but it would be a mistake to copy anything from them.
If you read these two in succession, it's pretty obvious that version #2 was rewritten from version #1, isn't it? How much more will you have to change?
Here’s an online tool that you can use to compare two chunks of text: DupeCop. I ran the two paragraphs above through it and got a 75%, meaning the “spun” version is 75% unique. That might be enough for some people to call them completely different paragraphs, but I think it should be higher, like at least 85% or 90%. That could be achieved by not looking at it sentence by sentence but rather by restating the whole article (in this case, just a paragraph) in your own way, like this:
Why is it important to write articles from your own point of view? Well, the only person who can say things the way you say them is YOU. So you shouldn’t simply reword other people’s content, but rather use them as idea springboards and for confirmation, and then write them from scratch yourself. How would you explain your subject to a friend in a nonchalant conversation? Write like that. You'll never get in trouble for stealing content that way.
When I compare that paragraph to the first one and run them through DupeCop, I get an 84%, which is significantly better, but you can see it can still tell that 16% of it is the same! And humans are even better at detecting whether two things came from the same source, so you have to be careful, not only due to copyright issues, but also simply because you want it to be clear that your site is unique and fabulous because it’s YOU writing it! Don’t be afraid to show your personality.
See To spin or not to spin for more information on article spinning, especially when it comes to spinning software.
I LOVE my “job.” Affiliate marketing takes work, but it doesn’t feel like work.
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