Well, I've been doing a lot of article marketing and I've been thinking about those free article rewriters. So, I tried them out. Guess, what. Not a single one passed Copyscape. I even tried correcting the rewriter's mistakes (i.e. grammer) and still Copyscape saw straight though it. So, I tried manual rewriting and the only way rewriting works is if you start from scratch. You have to have totally different setences and write alittle differentally. The problem is, writing is too complex for a program or script. So, from my little test. I want to tell you the only way to actually have two articles with same content/meaning is to rewrite it from scratch by yourself. (or outsource it) (please be aware, this is from my experience. Maybe, someone had a better result than me. I'm only just giving my advice. Hopeful, to save you time and money.)
This one is easy to use once you get it setup with all the words you want it to use hxxp://crewriter.com/
there's no better way to rewrite an article or a piece of text than rewriting it yourself or hiring someone to do that for you... It's good that you've come to the same conclusion, however, rewriting text that already exists somewhere else will lower the chance for you to make your readers want to read your articles as they will get the impression that you have only old and not unique content, by unique I mean something that you yourself have produced. It would be even better if you give a brief description of a particular topic with your own words and then present your thoughts and vies on the topic, something that would be intriguing to the readers, something that would provoke them to participate and speak out their minds...