The step
Where the DeepSeek paraphraser belongs in the work
The DeepSeek paraphraser restates a passage in different words, and where you put that step decides whether the output is usable. Put it after you have understood the source and written a note of your own, and it helps. Put it immediately after copying a paragraph out of a paper, and it produces something you should not submit.
Mechanically it is simple. Text goes to our AI server, one reworded version comes back with nothing wrapped around it, and you get 5 runs per rolling 24 hours at 1 to 12,000 characters each. No account, no card, no trial.
How to
How to paraphrase a passage in three steps
The tool occupies one of these three steps. The other two are yours and neither is optional.
- Step 1
- Close the source and write what it said in one sentence, from memory. If you cannot, you do not understand it well enough to paraphrase it yet.
- Step 2
- Paste the passage and set your constraints in the instruction field, within 300 characters. Terms to keep, claims not to strengthen, references to leave alone.
- Step 3
- Compare the output against both the source and your own one-sentence note, then attach the citation. The tool does neither of those things.
The method
The note-first method that avoids patchwriting
Patchwriting is taking a source passage, swapping 30 to 40 percent of the words, restructuring two or three sentences and calling it your paraphrase. A page read while researching this route states that it violates the academic honesty policies of essentially every US, UK, Canadian and Australian university, cited or not, because the sentence structure and argumentative skeleton still belong to the source author. Running the passage through a tool does not change that.
- Read, then close
- Work from your understanding, not from the paragraph on screen. This is the single change that moves output from patchwriting to paraphrase.
- Write your own order
- If your version reaches the source's points in the source's sequence, the skeleton is still theirs however different the words are.
- Use the tool on your note
- Paraphrasing your own rough sentence into clean prose is a writing task with no integrity dimension at all.
- Keep the source open for facts only
- Return to it to verify figures, dates and names, not to borrow structure.
- Cite regardless
- The obligation attaches to the idea, so it survives any amount of rewording.
Triage
Deciding whether to quote, paraphrase or summarise
Three operations, three different jobs. Choosing correctly removes most of the pressure people put on a paraphrasing tool.
- Quote it
- The wording is the evidence, or the phrasing is distinctive enough that restating it would misrepresent it. Quoting is not a failure.
- Paraphrase it
- You need the full detail in your own construction, at roughly the original length. This is what the tool is for.
- Summarise it
- You need the conclusion, not the detail. Shorter and in your own words, and a good instruction for this is a length in characters.
- All three
- Require the source credited. The operation changes what you write, never whether you attribute it.
Honest limits
Handling references the tool cannot see
This engine has no concept of a citation. It does not recognise a parenthetical reference, a footnote marker or a bracketed number, and it will not put one back where it belongs. Competing tools advertise citation preservation as a feature; we do not have one, so it is not on this page as a claim.
The workable approach is to name them: put keep every bracketed reference exactly where it appears in the instruction field, then check each one in the output against the original. On a passage with several references, it is often faster to strip them before the run, paraphrase the clean prose, and reinsert them yourself, because then you are checking your own placement rather than the model's.
Planning
Five runs, 12,000 characters, and what that covers
The allowance is 5 runs per rolling 24 hours, each returning individually rather than all at once. Each run takes up to 12,000 characters, which is a section of a paper rather than a sentence.
For comparison, both published on the competitors' own pages: one paraphrasing tool gives four runs in total on its free tier at 250 words a run, and 80 runs a month at 1,000 words a run on a plan costing 18 dollars a month. Another is a Word add-in with a 15-day trial and roughly 30 pounds for the full version. The practical consequence for a working session here is that you should batch: paraphrase a whole section in one run rather than a paragraph at a time.
Straight answer
Is using a paraphrasing tool cheating?
It depends on what goes in and what you do with what comes out, and the honest answer has two halves. Reworking your own draft is not an integrity question in any framework. Taking a source's argument, rewording it and presenting it as your own analysis is, and it remains so whether a tool, a friend or a thesaurus did the rewording.
On the question that usually follows: we make no claim about Turnitin, Copyleaks or any AI detector. They are third-party systems with their own indexes and thresholds, we are affiliated with none of them, and there is no similarity index in this tool to compare anything against. A passage that slips past a checker is not thereby yours.
In practice
Who uses the paraphraser, and when
Researchers converting a quotation-heavy draft into prose. Analysts restating a vendor's documentation for an internal audience. Second-language writers who understand a source completely and want a different construction in English, which is the most common legitimate use and the one that attracts the most unwarranted suspicion.
The signal that it is the right step is having something of your own to reword. When there is nothing of yours yet, the tool will produce fluent text that belongs to somebody else, and that is a worse position than an unfinished draft.