Rewriting vs copywriting: which one your site needs

Rewriting retells a finished text in your own words: the facts belong to someone else, the wording and the structure are yours. Copywriting starts from a blank page, so the idea, the arguments and the examples come from the writer. Rewriting is quicker and usually cheaper, but no new knowledge enters the text. Copywriting costs more and takes longer, and it gives you something that is not online yet. So rewriting vs copywriting comes down to one question: does a text already exist that can be retold?

Rewriting is reworking finished material: the content survives, the telling changes. The writer takes a source, breaks it into points, and puts each point in their own words. No new facts, examples or conclusions are added, because that part is not the rewriter’s job.

A word about names, since they cause half the confusion. English does not sell rewriting as a trade of its own. You will see it offered as content rewriting or article rewriting, or folded into editing. So this article talks about the work rather than the label: retelling material that exists, against writing material that does not.

The work comes in three depths. A light rewrite swaps words and reorders phrases, and it usually shows: the line of thought is still borrowed. A deep rewrite is a retelling from the points, with the source closed and a fresh outline. An SEO rewrite is the deep version aimed at search, with the terms people type in the headings and the opening.

The job covers reading the source, building a new structure, retelling it and checking the facts. It does not cover new material: nobody calls your expert, opens your figures or invents an argument the source never made. That is the boundary of the format, and the price grows out of it. The process itself has a separate guide — How to paraphrase a text: a step-by-step guide with examples.

Copywriting is text written from scratch for one particular job. The writer decides where to start, which arguments to make and what has to be proved. The material comes from their own experience, from talking to you, and from documents and primary sources.

There are three broad kinds. Sales copy moves the reader to act: a landing page, a service page, an email. Informational writing answers the reader’s question: an explainer, a guide, a review. SEO copywriting is the informational kind shaped by search and by what the results page already shows.

The expensive part is not the writing but the gathering. Someone has to understand the product, talk to your specialist, find the numbers and confirm them at source. An hour of conversation often yields more than a day of reading other people’s articles. That is why decent work of this kind starts with a brief.

What you get is material that did not exist before: your position, your examples, your figures. That is what separates it from any retelling, and it explains the price.

A table makes the choice quick, and it hides a trap: the criteria do not weigh the same. Cost and speed are visible at once; expertise shows up half a year later, when the page either brings in readers or sits there. So read the row about what you end up with before the row about cost.

The cost row is in words on purpose: rates follow the subject, the urgency and the writer. Any figure printed in an article goes stale faster than the page it sits on.

• Supplier product descriptions. The same paragraph sits on a dozen shops, and search sees a copy. Nothing has to be discovered here: you need your own text about the same product.
• News and press releases. The facts belong to someone else and can be checked. The value is in speed and in saying them plainly.
• Moving your own material to another channel. A site article becomes a post, a manual becomes a customer email. The content is already yours; only its shape changes.
• Refreshing an old page. The material still holds up, but it reads heavily and was written for an audience you no longer have.
• Turning the technical into the plain. An engineer’s document now has to serve sales or customers. The meaning is kept in full; only the language changes.

All five share one sign: you can hand a writer a source and say “the same thing, told your way”. If no such source exists, rewriting will not save the job: you get a careful retelling of somebody else’s mistake.

In all five the content already exists, and paying to invent it again makes no sense. The rough half of that work is worth handing to a machine. Rewrite the text with the AI rewriter in iBro, then go over the facts and the terms yourself. Three free runs a day are available without signing in.

• A landing page or a service page. The text has to sell your offer in particular, and no source contains it. It comes out of a conversation with you.
• An expert article. The value is the experience: what you tried, what failed and why. A retelling of someone else’s article will never contain it.
• Positioning and the About page. Here the text answers one question, which is how you differ. Written as a retelling of a rival, it will read like the rival.
• A customer case study or an interview. There is nothing online to work from. The material comes out of your data and the client’s own words.
• A new product or a new subject. There is nothing to rewrite, because the market has not written about it yet.

The sign is the same one reversed: you have nothing to show a writer except yourself. If the material can only come from your head, your data and your customers, write from scratch.

Overpaying tends to happen in one place: a from-scratch job is ordered where a rewrite plus one paragraph of yours would do. The test is easy: describe the task without the word “unique”. If what remains is “our own text about the same thing”, you are describing a rewrite.

What the five have in common is that no source exists, and the cost sits in the gathering. You can still shorten the start: draft it in the iBro text generator from your own brief, then add what only you know.

Most of the time the better answer is to combine. You take a solid source and rewrite its base deeply. Then you add a block of your own: a paragraph of experience, an example, figures from your practice. The result costs closer to a rewrite than to a page written from nothing.

The order matters: retell from the points first, then add your own passages, then check the facts and the terms. Putting your material into someone else’s text is harder than making that text yours first.

Work out the saving by how much of the result is yours. If your share is two paragraphs and a couple of figures, the hybrid is almost always cheaper. Once more than half the text is yours, the saving disappears.

The roles divide the same way. A machine is good at the rough pass: the retelling, the tightening, the change of tone. A person owns the facts, the caveats and the decision about what is worth saying. If the edited text comes out dry, improve the style and readability in a separate pass.

Half the complaints about finished text come from the brief, not from the writer. Below are two short checklists. Work ordered against them comes back without ten messages of clarification.

A brief for a rewrite:

• a link to the source, and what you like about it
• what has to change: the structure, the tone, the length
• what must not be touched: terms, figures, names, legal wording
• the search terms, and where in the text they belong
• length and format: paragraphs, lists, subheadings
• who the text is for and where it will be published
• the deadline

A brief for writing from scratch:

• the purpose: what the reader should do once they finish
• the audience: who they are and what they already know
• what you are selling, and how it differs from the offers beside it
• the material you supply: figures, cases, documents, who to interview
• the search terms, if the text is meant for search
• length, tone, and examples of writing you like and dislike
• the deadline, and who signs the work off

The difference between the lists is the difference between the formats. In the first you hand over a source; in the second you hand over knowledge.

Accept the work against the same brief, not against a feeling. For a rewrite: are the terms and figures intact, has the structure moved. For a from-scratch job: is there anything the neighbouring results do not have. If not, you were handed a retelling at the price of original work.

Rewriting is for content that already exists and has to be told your way; writing from scratch is for content that does not exist. Borderline cases usually resolve into the hybrid: a deep rewrite of the base plus your own block of experience. To avoid arguing about the result, agree on two things rather than on a job title. Where does the material come from, and what should happen to the reader by the end? A draft is a reasonable place to begin — rewrite the material you already have, or build a new one in iBro.