How To Expertly Rephrase Your Content for Better Engagement

Rephrasing is a technique that allows writers to restate content using different words and phrases without changing its meaning. Other terms for rephrasing are “rewording,” and “paraphrasing.”

With this technique, a writer can play around and find better ways to say something. This is particularly useful in content writing where clarity and simplicity are paramount. This technique is commonly used to improve engagement through readability of web content such as online articles, and blog posts.

You can guess that content engagement is particularly important for digital marketing. So, it is no surprise that content marketers always try to find cost-effective ways to rephrase content for better engagement. In this article, we will teach you some of these ways so that you can improve your content.

Tips for Rephrasing Content to Boost Engagement

These practical tips for rephrasing content can help you enhance your content’s engagement. Each tip will also be accompanied by an explanation as to why it works.

• Rephrase Content in Active Voice

The two voices in English writing are especially important. They are known as Active voice and Passive voice. The characteristics of active voice are as follows:

• The parts of speech are in this order “Subject=> Verb=> Object”
• It is very direct and leaves little room for confusion.

The benefits of active voice are that it follows the logical flow of “who” is doing an “action” on “something.”

Passive voice, on the other hand, reverses this logical flow. It takes away the attention from the subject and puts it on the object instead. This is the order of parts of speech in passive voice.

“Object=> Verb=> Subject”

To illustrate the differences between passive and active voice here is an example.

Active Voice:

“The dog bites the kid.”

Passive Voice:

“The kid was bitten by the dog.”

As you can see the sentence in active voice is shorter and easier to understand, while the passive voice sentence is needlessly long. Hence, to improve engagement you should rephrase your content in an active voice so that it is short and easy to read. This encourages the readers to keep on reading as they will not find it difficult to do so. This can be done either yourself or you can do it with the help of a rephrase which is an online tool that can paraphrase given text. Here is what that looks like.

So, you can try and use a rephraser when you are short on time or just not feeling up to the task.

• Avoid Redundancy

Each writer has some words and phrases that they like to use a lot. Such expressions are known as crutch words. Crutch words have an upside and a downside. The advantage is that they give a write-up of some personality. The writer’s style of speaking is expressed using these words.

However, too much usage of such expressions makes the text look very repetitive. Repetitive text is not engaging. It is the very opposite i.e., boring. So, writers need to ensure that they rephrase their content to avoid such repetitions in their text. Another instance of repetition is when writers describe the same thing many times. That adds redundancy and repetition which is quite boring to read.

Here is an example of some text that is repetitive and how it can be rephrased.

Repetitive Text:

“The rain poured relentlessly, drumming on the roof, splattering against the windows, and creating a symphony of soothing sounds.”

Rephrased Version:

“The pouring rain over the house created a symphony of soothing sounds.”

In this example, we can see that the action of “Rain falling” has been described three times. The three instances are:

• Poured relentlessly.
• Drumming on the roof
• Splattering against the windows

All three phrases describe the same action which is “rain falling.” In the rephrased version, the redundancy has been removed as it only describes rain falling once and moves on to the next thing.

• Change the Sentence Structure

Sentence structure refers to the “make” of a sentence. The components that have been used, and in which order define the sentence structure. Changing active and passive voice also falls under altering sentence structure.

There are four types of sentence structures:

• Simple sentences
• Compound sentences
• Complex sentences
• Compound complex sentences

A simple sentence only consists of an independent clause. If two independent clauses are connected with a conjunction, then this is referred to as a compound sentence. Complex sentences consist of an independent clause and a dependent clause that is joined together with conjunctions and subordinators. Finally, compound-complex sentences consist of at least two independent clauses and one dependent clause.

Just from the definitions, it will be obvious that complex and compound-complex sentences are quite difficult to read. If you are not convinced here, is an example.

Compound Complex sentence:

“While I enjoy going for long walks in the park, my sister prefers to stay at home and read, but our parents encourage us to find a balance between outdoor activities and intellectual pursuits.”

A simpler version of this sentence can be created by altering the sentence structure. So here is the rephrased version.

Rephrased Version:

“I like walking in the park while my sister prefers reading at home. Our parents suggest a balance between outdoor activities and intellectual pursuits.”

As you can see the sentence was broken down into two. The independent clause “our parents encourage us to find a balance….” sentence was separated by a period. Readers can understand this passage better as it is no longer a run-on sentence.

So, content writers must take care to avoid using such sentence structure and keep things simple. They can rephrase their content to rectify such structures to make their content easier to read, thus more engaging.

Conclusion

So, that is how you can expertly rephrase your content for better engagement. If you were paying attention, then you must have noticed that the common point for each tip was making the content easier to read.

Making content easier to read makes it palatable. People can easily spend time reading something if they do not have to waste time using other resources to understand it. And that concludes our article on expert rephrasing.