How to Use AI to Clean Up Paragraphs

Writers working in a variety of businesses and sectors use AI to boost efficiency and accuracy in their research, composition, and editing. Certain AI programs are, in fact, quite adept at streamlining text: They can help you clean up sentences and paragraphs by eliminating typos, correcting word choices, paraphrasing, and editing for general clarity and coherence. 

Discover how to use AI to clean up paragraphs and improve your writing overall.

Understanding AI writing tools

As with any AI technology, the overall purpose of an AI writing tool is to help writers and editors automate menial tasks while simplifying complex ones. AI writing tools can help you: 

• Improve efficiency

• Increase productivity 

• Improve readability

• Reduce chances of plagiarism

• Boost search engine optimization (SEO)

How to use AI to clean up paragraphs and other text

AI is a complex, growing field, but with a little technical know-how, you can understand how AI tools work and use such tools to your advantage. 

Natural language processing (NLP) is an AI programming modality that allows computers to comprehend human speech in a fairly sophisticated way and, in many cases, to output remarkably human-like responses to prompts and queries. It is NLP’s ability to produce text that mimics human language in a natural-sounding way that makes AI writing and editing tools effective. NLP works via a complex system incorporating computational linguistics (a discipline that also applies to the study of human speech itself), probabilistic machine learning (ML), and other advancing technologies. 

You can use AI writing and editing algorithms to make your content: 

• More grammatically correct

• More contextually relevant

• Higher-quality

You might use AI text cleanup frameworks to improve your text’s general readability. You might also find them useful in generating plagiarism-free content or optimizing text for SEO purposes. 

Using AI to clean up paragraphs is simple. First, you input your original text into the AI tool. Next, the AI program uses NLP to analyze your text semantically and syntactically in order to understand certain linguistic patterns. Then, relying on language models for natural-sounding phrasing, it reconfigures the original piece with improvements while retaining the meaning and intent of the input text. Finally, the AI tool outputs new text—or rather, a reworked, cleaned-up piece based on your original text. 

Editing and proofreading capabilities

Modern AI possesses a number of fast, accurate editing and proofreading capabilities. 

Identifying grammatical errors

AI writing and editing algorithms can detect mistakes in grammar, identify incorrect word usage, and automatically correct typos. Some interfaces can even explain why such mistakes are incorrect, helping you improve your writing skills. 

As a writing professional, you may find AI’s ability to identify and fix grammatical errors particularly useful: Poor grammar not only looks unprofessional, it can make the meaning of your text ambiguous. Writers and editors who use AI do so with the hope of correcting such issues instantly and automatically. 

Improving readability

AI can help you improve the readability of your text in a number of ways. 

Simplifying complex sentences

AI writing tools can improve the general readability of your paragraph by rephrasing confusing or awkward sentences. To do so, the tool might remove excess words, phrases, or even entire portions of text from your piece, streamlining your writing in seconds. 

AI can also help explicate the relationship between ideas by working clearer transition words and phrases into your paragraph. This makes it so that your writing doesn’t appear to merely list events but instead suggests more powerful, causal connections between events—i.e., that one event happens because the previous one happened. 

Adjusting word choice

AI tools can help you choose the correct word when you’ve chosen the wrong one. Many words in English sound similar, and many maxims, cliches, and popular sayings are so embedded in everyday speech that you may get them wrong when the time comes to write them out. 

Take these examples in which the incorrectly heard phrase precedes its accurate original: 

• To all intensive purposes (to all intents and purposes)

• Should of (should have)

• Deep-seeded (deep-seated)

AI can also help you identify instances of unwanted or incorrect language usage or grammar, such as: 

• Passive voice

• Dangling modifiers

• Sentence fragments

Paraphrasing

AI writing tools can help eliminate redundancy. They can also paraphrase content—they are capable of conveying the original meaning of a source text in a concise way without resorting to quoting it precisely. 

However, merely changing a word here and there comes off as stilted. It may even still constitute plagiarism. AI paraphrasing tools work to come up with far more original-sounding content based on your initial input. 

Tailoring content to audience 

AI algorithms consistently take in data, analyze it, identify new patterns in it, and tailor output accordingly. This is what’s happening when, say, Amazon or Netflix suggests new items or shows they think you might like. 

These algorithms can help AI analyze an audience demographic and then edit your paragraph with audience preferences and reading comprehension levels in mind. Marketing-oriented AI add-ons can further help make sure you’re writing for your ideal audience by monitoring key metrics such as: 

• Engagement rate

• Conversion rate

• Customer retention

If these metrics are up, then you’re likely reaching your target audience. 

Popular AI writing tools

A number of AI tools exist, including ProWritingAid, QuillBot, and Originality.AI. Other popular choices include: 

Grammarly

This is a free writing and editing tool that’s been around for some time. Grammarly emphasizes ethical AI use with a focus on user privacy. They do not sell user data to third parties. They also filter out biased or hateful content to the extent that they can, and they thoroughly research and manage the risks associated with new features. 

Copy.AI

A free paragraph rewriter isn’t the only benefit of copy.ai’s AI writing interface. They use multiple NLP modalities for more fluent, sophisticated writing and editing capabilities. (Many AI models, such as ChatGPT, only use one.)

Semrush 

This popular SEO toolkit offers a free paragraph rewriter under the name ContentShake AI. Its features include an intuitive interface that allows users to change paragraph phrasing with the push of a button. Options include: rephrase, formal, casual, improve, simplify, and summarize. 

Use cases and applications

Writers in many different industries and sectors use AI tools in a variety of ways. 

Academic writing

Academics, researchers, and students can prompt AI to write papers for them and then use AI editing tools to streamline them. 

Using AI in this way can create issues, of course. It’s difficult, if not impossible, to trace the origins of AI training inputs. This means that mistakes can get through, and you can’t necessarily verify where they came from. Furthermore, AI programmers don’t quite understand exactly how AI models make decisions. They know the basics—i.e., predictive statistical models—but there’s more to it, and they’re not sure quite what. Programmers call this the “black box” problem. 

Business communications

Business professionals can utilize AI tools for writing documents, such as:

• Emails 

• Reports 

• Marketing messages

In terms of making data-based decisions, AI can be dicey: Its research methods are untrackable, and its results non-reproducible. For example, you might compose an email with the help of AI one day and get a different output the next day, despite specifying the same parameters. 

Creative writing

Corporate creatives, such as copywriters, often use AI to help generate and improve the text and visual output they use for marketing purposes. If you are an artistic writer, AI can be great for helping you brainstorm storytelling ideas. AI can help fiction and nonfiction authors with: 

• Generating ideas

• Developing plot outlines

• Creating characters

• Improving language

• Proofreading and revising your story

As a storytelling device, AI doesn’t go much beyond this, however. AI writing tends to be repetitive and simplistic—unengaging, in other words—and many consider it unethical to put your name to AI-derived text, even if you had a part in editing the final result. Doing so may even be illegal in some cases. 

Limitations and considerations

Like any technology, AI writing and editing tools are not without their limitations.

Understanding AI limitations

As sophisticated as NLP and ML have become, AI still can’t quite capture the most nuanced elements of human speech. It possesses no dynamic cultural awareness and has no notion of the role body language plays in human communication. 

Generative AI can produce hallucinations—incorrect, even downright phantasmagorical, answers to prompts. It can make up citations, facts, and even bespoke grammar rules that render its output unreadable (or at least unusable for business or academic purposes). 

AI models are only as good as the data they’re trained on. Biased, incorrect, or noisy data will result in concomitant poor output. 

Using AI as a supplement

AI can power research and analysis processes, just as it can help with paragraph editing and composition. Many hybrid use cases exist, such as AI utilizing: 

• Google Analytics

• Salesforce

• HubSpot

However, you should always be careful about the trust you put in AI. Many business and research organizations discourage the use of AI writing altogether because an AI algorithm can’t be held responsible for mistakes the way a human writer can. Many simply consider it outright unethical to claim AI-derived writing as your own. 

Getting started with Coursera

Using AI to clean up your paragraphs is just one of the many ways you can use this tool. 

Learn more with Coursera today. Check out the University of Michigan’s course, Good with Words: Writing and Editing Specialization, to get going. You might then consider their AI for Creative Work Specialization to learn more about how to combine human and machine-derived writing.