How to Rearrange a Sentence Quickly

Is there a quick way to rearrange words in a sentence, and do it quickly and productively?

Whether you want to paraphrase a sentence from an old book or a poem to explain its meaning to someone or you need to change a formal wording for it to sound clearer, here are a few ways to do it quickly:

Use This Quick Sentence Rearrangement Trick

Sentence rearrangement is a useful mental trick. It forces your brain to work more creatively and helps you become a better writer.

While many professional writers will recommend reading a sentence carefully prior to rearranging it, I suggest a different technique to paraphrase a sentence quickly:

1. Read a sentence quickly
2. Restate important points in voice
3. Write it down in your own words
4. Re-read the original sentence to make sure you preserved the meaning well

If you remember the original sentence too well, it will be harder for you to pick different wording as your brain will be stuck on what it just remembered. So to rearrange a sentence quicker, read it lightly first. You’ll be able to correct yourself later. 

This is the most effortless sentence paraphrasing technique where you don’t have to think too hard to find synonyms and replacement words. You are simply restating the meaning.

Practice it often and you’ll notice getting better and faster at rearranging sentences.

Use a Sentence a Paraphrasing Tool

Quillbot is a freemium tool allowing you to reword any sentence for free, without the need to sign up or login.

The tool uses Artificial Intelligence to help you achieve greater clarity and understand any sentence quicker.

It actually does a good job rearranging sentences on the fly, with one click of a button. It will also provide synonyms and highlight them for your convenience.

Here’s an example I used,

With demand for housing in cities skyrocketing, the most obvious next step would be to turn empty offices into apartments and condos

And here’s what the tool came up,

Turning vacant offices into apartments and condos would be the most logical next step given the rapidly increasing demand for housing in cities.

You can click any highlighted synonym or replacement phrase and choose an alternative one to make it sound better.

You can sign up for the free account here

How to Paraphrase a Poem

Paraphrasing a poem means conveying what the poet had to say in your own words. The goal is usually to simplify and clarify the poem.

Paraphrasing a poem can be challenging because you are bound to lose most of its magic. Yet, sometimes you have to do that, so Quillbot is a good way to speed up the process. 

Here’s what it did with Juliet’s monologue. As you can see, it is pretty close (the first sentence doesn’t make as much sense though) and it took less than a second:

Describe Montague.
There are no hands or feet.
not even an arm, face, or other body part
possessing a male.
O may go by another name.
What’s a name worth?
what we refer to as a rose
If it had another name, it would smell as lovely.

It is definitely not as beautiful but who can compete with Shakespeare?

The tool does mess up the old phrases but the nice thing is that it recognizes and skips proper names, so the meaning is preserved very well.

I’ve tested the tool on the whole monologue and shared my results in this video:

What is the purpose of rearranging a sentence?

There can be lots of purposes for rearranging sentences:

• Training your brain to become better at expressing yourself and writing (this is a good exercise to do with kids)
• Simplifying or clarifying the meaning of a sentence that sounds too formal or archaic
• Explaining the meaning of a paragraph or a poem to a child
• Avoiding being called out for plagiarism
• Fixing your own wiring style to make it more readable

There may be more reasons but these are the most common ones.

What is sentence rearrangement?

Same as paraphrasing, sentence rearrangement is changing wording in a sentence to convey its meaning without copying it.

How do you rearrange sentences?

There are many techniques, but normally you rearrange a sentence by replacing words and phrases with synonyms and changing the order of words and structured (while following grammar rules)

Paraphrasing is a great mental exercise but if you need to do it quickly, try using online tools.

What are some rearranged sentence examples?

Whether you are paraphrasing text to make it sound clearer or trying to avoid plagiarizing anyone’s content, the above techniques and tools will help you quickly and effortlessly rearrange any sentence!