Frequently Asked Questions

Does Rewordify.com integrate in any way with other assistive tech, such as Bookshare, Learning Ally, and others? Rewordify.com is a standalone site that doesn't connect or integrate with any other sites. Offering copyrighted work on any site requires a tremendous commitment of time and resources to navigate burdensome and labyrinthine legal requirements and agreements. If you want to volunteer your time and effort to help such integration possible, please contact us.

Is Rewordify.com available in other languages besides English? No, Rewordify.com is only available in English.

Can I embed Rewordify.com into our site? You are welcome to put a link to Rewordify.com's home page on your site. We do not restrict you from embedding Rewordify.com into a page on your site, but we do not offer any support to do so.

I have a textbook, novel, or other book I want to put on the site (or have available on the site). How do I do that? Due to US copyright law, you may not post copyrighted material on Rewordify.com. We cannot make copyrighted work available on the site. Please note that you may save and share documents as a "link-only" document for your students for educational purposes.

Where can I get an API key? There is no API available for Rewordify.com. You may stumble upon API pages on an Internet search, but API keys are no longer given out due to licensing restrictions.

How much is a subscription? How do I buy the software? Rewordify.com is completely free online software—you're using it now. There's no subscription. There's nothing to buy. There's nothing to install. There's no site license. This site is the software, and the software is the site. You just point your (and your students') browsers to Rewordify.com and start using it with all your students. (We keep children safe on our site. Also, Rewordify.com cannot be used to circumvent your school's Internet filter.) Rewordify.com works on any computer, tablet, or smartphone. It seems to be too good to be true, but it is. You can use Rewordify.com as much as you want, with as many people as you want, for as long as you want, for free, now.

What are the system requirements to run Rewordify.com? What operating systems are needed? We have great news for you: Rewordify.com works on all computers, all browsers, and all operating systems. PCs, iPads, Chromebooks, Android phones, and more---Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Safari, and more---all of them run Rewordify.com perfectly. Just point your browser to Rewordify.com and it will work. Rewordify.com works entirely within the browser and does not require any software, add-ons, or anything else to be installed.

A document on the site is too long and has too many vocabulary words. How do I break it up into smaller pieces? First, "rewordify" a document. Scroll down to the yellow box. Highlight and "copy" a section of the original document. Open a new tab and go to Rewordify.com. Be sure you're logged in. On the home page, paste in the smaller section and "rewordify" it. Then, click the "share" tab and share it. Repeat this process to break up the original document into smaller documents. Then, assign the smaller sections to your students. You can even combine the smaller sections into a "book" for your and your students' convenience. Please read more about sharing documents, combining documents into books, and managing assignments in Educator Central.

How do I print a vocabulary quiz for only particular words? Rewordify.com is designed to help people become independent learners. Spend less time typing up vocabulary tests and more time teaching your students how to use the site and how to learn. You can use the free Educator Central to monitor your students as they read and learn from anything they want. If you need to ensure your students are learning particular vocabulary words, be sure you're logged in, and create and share a document that has text content that contains those words within sentences. (Do not enter only vocabulary lists into Rewordify.com as the site won't work right. Rewordify.com must work with (and teach) English prose or poetry.)

The site isn't "rewording" certain words I'd like it to. Can I add (or select) my own words to rewordify? You can make your own customized word lists, so the site works exactly the way you want, with the words you want to teach. To protect the site, there are some restrictions on customized word lists. Also, please tell us about any words that aren't rewordifying, or that are rewordifying incorrectly.

How do I get documents on the site and assign them to my students? First, be sure you're logged in. You have to "rewordify" a passage and then "share" it for it to be visible to others and to assign it to your students. Please read more about sharing documents and managing assignments in Educator Central.

How do I save what I'm doing on the site? If you're logged in, the site automatically saves everything you rewordify for your convenience. You can view, edit, delete, and share all this history content at any time! Learn more.

Why aren't my settings saving? Is your browser set to block or disable cookies? Cookies must be enabled on your browser to use Rewordify.com to its fullest. With cookies disabled, any settings you set will be erased the next time you rewordify something, and the site will revert to its default behavior.

Why isn't the highlighting printing in color when I print? To print the highlighting in color, you must go into your browser's "Options" or "Page Setup" and select "Print background colors," or some other similar option. Without doing that, the colored highlighting behind the words won't print. Here's more information.

How do I rewordify a scan or a cell phone picture?
Rewordify.com can only simplify text. We recommend doing an Internet search for the words free online OCR. Upload your scan or image to any of those sites, get the text, and copy-paste it into our site. When you create an account, you can save the text as a document, so you have access to it from then on.

I think I forgot my password. Why won't the password recovery process work? If you can't log in, and the password recovery process doesn't work, you probably either never successfully registered under the username you think you did, or you misspelled your email address or username when you registered.

Try registering again on Rewordify.com with your email address as your username and it will probably work. If it doesn't, contact us and we'll help you.

Why else can't I log in?
Is your browser blocking cookies? If so, you won't be able to log in. Try allowing cookies from rewordify.com.

If you enter your username and password, but the login doesn't work, make sure you're at https://rewordify.com. If you're not at the https site, the login process won't work. Click here for the right page.

How do I find or reset a student password?
To view and optionally reset a student password, log in. Then, click on Educator Central. Then, click on the student's name. The student's password is listed. If it says "[changed by user]", the student changed his or her own password. To reset it, click Change next to the password field.

To get a report of all student passwords, be sure you're logged in and at Educator Central. Click on the Charts & Reports button. Then, in the dropdown, select Report: Student Login Information.

How do I add or delete a class in Educator Central?
There isn't a separate "add or delete a class" feature. Rewordify.com automatically makes class lists based on how you assign classes to students. This is done under Educator Central, under the Student Accounts button. Click on a student name and work with the Class field. If you assign a new class name to a student, Rewordify.com automatically adds that class to the class list. If no more students are assigned to a class, Rewordify.com removes that class from the class list.

Why isn't the site simplifying the word ____________? You can make your own customized word lists, so the site works exactly the way you want. If you see a difficult word or phrase that you think we're missing, please tell us about it and we'll try to add it to the site.

Where are the Google/Facebook/LinkedIn sign in buttons? After careful review, we decided not to place social media signin buttons on Rewordify.com. We made this decision because we could not get satisfactory answers to these questions:

How will you get access to your Rewordify.com data if you delete your social media account, or if you choose to no longer associate Rewordify.com to your social media account? What happens if you register an account with an email address or username the traditional way, use the account for a while, and then later want to sign up and log in with a social media button? Since we do not know your password if you log in with social media buttons, how would we verify that you are really you (and not a malicious person who has walked up to your computer) when you want to do sensitive things, like deleting your account? If you use the site as a student for a while under your school's Google account, how can you continue to access your account after you graduate and your school's Google account is deactivated?

We understand that typing in yet another username and password is an inconvenience, but the alternative—no control over and no access to your account—is unacceptable. We will continue to review this decision and make these buttons available if we can get satisfactory answers to these questions.

Why is my Learning Session acting weirdly? Each person must start his or her own individual Learning Sessions. Do not share Learning Sessions with others. When you start a Learning Session, don't give the URL you're using to others, or you'll all be learning the same words at the same time in the same Learning Session, interfering with each other's work.

If multiple people want to learn words, have each of them go to the "reworded" document, and have each of them start their own Learning Session by clicking on the buttons in the purple bar above the text.

How do I print cloze activities, vocab lists, quizzes, etc.?
After rewordifying some text or viewing a document, click the Print / Learning activities button at the top of the text.

Why is the site pronouncing the word __________ wrong? Did you know that English can be extremely difficult to pronounce? Slough rhymes with "moo." Rough rhymes with "guff." Bough rhymes with "how." Phew! A computer program tries to decide how to pronounce the words and phrases on this site, and sometimes it messes up. If you discover a word that's being pronounced really, really badly, let us know and we'll try to manually record it correctly.

How do I print what's on the screen?
Printing is an easy two-step process. As you're viewing some rewordified text, click the Print / Learning activities button near the top. From the choices presented, pick whether you want to print the original harder text, or the rewordified version. (You can print lots of other things from that page, too.) Then, scroll down and click Print. A printable page will appear. On that page, click Print this page near the top.

How do I create a document that others can see?
First, log in or register an account by clicking the links near the top of any page. Then, paste in some text and rewordify it. Click the Share button at the top and follow the instructions. Read more about sharing documents.

How do I delete a document I created?
First, log in. Click the My Learning/My Documents link at the top of the page. Click the Documents button. Check the checkbox next to the document you want to delete. Near the top of the list of documents, click on the words Delete all checked documents. Here's more information.

You're missing a piece of classic literature. How can I add it?
We'll add it for you! Please contact us and tell us the author and title of the piece of classic literature. We'll add it, and let you know when it's added. (See the next item.)

Why isn't [book name] in the Classic Literature section? A famous work needs to be in the public domain in the United States in order for us to make it publicly available. In almost all cases, a work must have been published before 1923 in order for it to be in the public domain. If we've missed something that you'd like to see on the site, and you're sure that it was published before 1923, please tell us about it and we'll add it.

Why did the READ score increase for the "simpler" text? Our READ score is a reliable, valid measure of text difficulty. In some circumstances, after text is rewordified, the READ score can increase. This is usually due to the rewordified text being much longer than the original text. Since the reworded text is longer and contains longer sentences, the READ score will increase because longer sentences mean a greater reading difficulty score. This is misleading because the reworded, longer, text is much easier to read. All reading difficulty measures suffer from this shortcoming. This is why one should never place too much emphasis on computer-generated text difficulty measures.

This increase of the READ score with rewordified text can also occur if the original text has rarely-seen technical, medical, or scientific terms. Since Rewordify.com doesn't count very rarely-seen words (like dehalogenation) against the READ score, it can underestimate the initial difficulty level of highly technical, medical, or scientific text.

How do I simplify text to a specific grade level?
No computer in the world can read and understand a difficult text and then thoughtfully and effectively rewrite it, omitting details, shortening sentences, and simplifying figurative language as appropriate, to match a certain reading level. Rewordify.com can effectively simplify text to six different levels, and show you a READ score that is an estimate of the text's difficulty at each level, but it takes a good teacher to match texts to readers.

Simplifying difficult text—regardless of its difficulty—to target primary grades is particulary challenging, and is completely impossible for any computer to do. We sometimes get emails from teachers asking questions like, Why can't the site simplify X to a fourth grade level? In short: no computer can.

How do I remove an offensive or inappropriate document on the site? At the bottom of the document, you'll see a link that says Report this content as inappropriate. Click it and fill out the form. We'll investigate right away and remove it if it violates our Site Rules.

How do I remove my copyrighted content on your site? At the bottom of the document, you'll see a link that says Report this content as inappropriate. Click it and fill out the form. We'll investigate right away. Be sure you include your correct email address. We will get back to you with instructions on how to complete legal paperwork that will enable you to remove the infringing content.

How do I delete my account? See this document.