The Pedant 7: How to make your editor happy: Close encounters of the word kind
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To coin a rather hackneyed online expression, I tried a paraphrasing tool so you don't have to. And my experience suggests that you probably don't want to. Whatever a paraphrasing tool is for, it's definitely not for writers; though it might, alas, be an invaluable gift for plagiarists.
This was not a comprehensive survey of the available tools; I have instead provided a snapshot. And a couple of caveats; I did not look at reviews but chose tools that appeared high on search lists, and I used only free tools - much as I admire and respect you all, I don't want to spend money on you. But what I found was fairly consistent across the board.
I decided to use two sentences: one that clearly needs some work and one that is very well turned to begin with. The first is from a rather rushed piece of journalism. The second is a line from a K J Parker novel (I recommend his books) and was a comical coincidence; I read it the morning after the UK election.
I entered each sentence into a number of paraphrasing tools and recorded the answers. I wanted to know: the level of understanding of the original sentence; the diversity (or otherwise) of solutions; and to what extent the original meaning was preserved in the paraphrase. I used about twenty different tools; enough, I hope, to be representative.
On all counts, the results of my little survey varied from amusing to worrying. I'm not sure what I was expecting but the results were often a surprise. And they all had something to tell me about my list of criteria. (Note that I've included representative examples here rather than an exhaustive list of results.)
So, the first sentence; as mentioned, this is not exactly Shakespearean in its sweep:
From the plane emerged an inescapable scene of frailty.
This is an inept description of Joe Biden coming down the steps of Air Force One. So the first thing I discovered is that the tool doesn't search for the original sentence; this would have been easy to find as it's on the BBC website (I'll have more to say on this point).
Here is a sample of the paraphrase results:
A scene of inevitable weakness peered out of the plane. (x 2)
A sight of inevitable weakness peered out of the aircraft. (x 3)
A scene of vulnerability was unmistakably revealed as the plane landed.
It's clear there is no knowledge or understanding of the original. This tool does not read a sentence; it searches elements of the sentence and finds alternatives for them. The homogeneity of the results strongly suggests that many of the tools out there use the same database and algorithms; the differences between the first two results are all single word synonyms.
Each has distorted the meaning of the original in ways that a human editor would not: ‘inevitable' is a poor alternative for ‘inescapable'; ‘peered' is a long way off ‘emerged'; and the last result has moved on altogether, to what looks to me like quite another scene.
On to our second sentence; (no slight on current government intended; it was just a coincidence that made me giggle):
In the land of the totally stupid, the halfwit is prime minister.
And the results (different in some respects to the first):
The halfwit is prime minister in the land of the completely dumb.
The halfwit serves as prime minister in the land of the utterly stupid. (x 2)
The halfwit is prime minister in the land of the completely stupid. (x 2)
Every result uses the same operation; it turns the sentence on its head. There is no recognition (as there would be with even a semi-conscious editor) that the sentence is a variation on a more famous model. Thus the initial operation neatly removes the cultural syntax and aims for the mundane.
Again, the results are pretty homogeneous. There is less sense distortion here but I suspect that has more to do with the clarity of the original than the intellectual prowess of the tool. I'd advise a writer to be cautious in using ‘dumb' as a synonym for ‘stupid' but otherwise there is little change in meaning.
I don't think I will provoke any controversy if I say that none of the results is an improvement on the originals; all are of noticeably lower quality. With the second sentence that might be expected; but the first set a pretty low bar and the tools managed to get under it. None of the results were complete gobbledygook, although a few earlier attempts with lines from Shakespeare and Donne produced hilarious doggerel.
Part of the weakness here is that the tool doesn't understand the original, and is unable to assess its quality (a human editor would do this automatically). So you won't get a dialogue box saying, ‘This sentence is good, don't change it.' For a writer using English as a second language, or a person who can write but lacks confidence, this is a real drawback; they will regularly end up with inferior material without realising it.
More worryingly, I think these tools are gold for the plagiarist; not just because they provide alternative wording, however clunky and inept. The tool doesn't check for the original, so the plagiarist is free to produce a version that is still effectively plagiarised but partly hidden by a machine. This opens the door to cheating on a grand scale; cheating that is very difficult to detect.
My little excursion into the online version of automatic writing was instructive, I think. I discovered that the utility of the tool is largely limited to absolute entry level writers and literary cheats. For the writer, aspiring or competent, they are more or less useless.
When he isn't editing, Noel Rooney writes a regular column for Fortean Times magazine, and wilfully obscure poetry. He lives in South London with his family and rather too many animals.
The Pedant: how to make your editor happy 1: Accents
The Pedant: how to make your editor happy 2: Dialogue tags
The Pedant: how to make your editor happy 4: Spoilt for choice: formats and fonts
The Pedant: how to make your editor happy 5: The trouble with ‘as'
The Pedant: how to make your editor happy 6: What's all the fuss over hyphens?
