Rewriting an essay to avoid AI detection
Two or three paragraphs usually carry the whole score. Finding them turns a rewrite into twenty minutes of work instead of an afternoon.
The instinct on seeing a high number is to rewrite the whole essay. That is almost always the wrong amount of work, because a document score is an average and the signal is rarely spread evenly.
Find the paragraphs that carry it
Score per paragraph rather than per document. In most essays two or three paragraphs sit well above the rest and the others are fine.
The ones that sit highest are predictable:
Formulaic sections. A methods description, a procedure, a background summary. Formulaic by design, and formulaic reads as machine-made.
The most-revised sections. Editing smooths and smoothing removes variation, so the paragraph you worked hardest on frequently scores highest. See why good writing gets flagged more.
The introduction and conclusion. Both follow a template and both get polished more than the middle.
Fix those and leave the rest alone.
The four changes, in order of effect
Vary sentence length. The strongest signal there is. Human academic writing in our corpus has a within-document standard deviation of 8.7 words, generated text 6.4. In a flagged paragraph, find three sentences of similar length, split one and merge another pair.
Delete connective openings. "Moreover", "Furthermore", "Additionally", "Overall". These open 2.4% of human sentences and 5.8% of generated ones.
Restore the specifics. Replace "various approaches" with two named approaches, "significant improvement" with the figure. This usually improves the essay as well.
Break the paragraph template. Let a paragraph be two sentences. Drop the closing sentence that restates the opening.
Two things to avoid
Do not run it through a paraphraser. Word-level substitution leaves the structure intact, which is where the score comes from, and the uniform transformation can flatten what variation you had. See paraphrasing to avoid AI detection.
Do not do another polish pass. Polishing smooths, and smoothing raises the score. This is the single most common way people make a flagged essay worse.
Work in a loop
Score, change the highest paragraph, score again. The loop matters because the changes are local and you want to see each one land rather than rewriting on faith.
That needs a tool with no word cap and no per-check limit, since a single essay may go through five or six times.
Ours is free and unlimited with no account, takes .pdf, .docx and .tex, scores every paragraph separately, and never stores your text. Wrong-flag rate on genuine human writing 0.4%, published, against Turnitin's 4%.