I know that it is unwise to submit the same article to lots of directories, because of duplicate content penalization, but what about one article to like two or three directories? Would there still be strong penalization? I would probably change a few sentences between each submission, but it would not be to a large extent, certainly not what you would get with a spinning tool. Anyways, I was just wondering if I should try something like that, or stick to submitting a unique article to every directory.
You may want to be careful with the rules of the site you are posting on regarding similar or duplicate content, but as far as Google is concerned, I think you are okay as long as you stick to modifying pieces here and there across a few different sites. I have done some light re-write work before for a few clients and posting to some of the big article directories with the lightly re-written articles (around 15-20% unique) worked well for them. You may want to avoid creating all your inbound links in that way but if you have a nice balance across various article sites of 100% original vs light re-write, along with inbounds from other sources (forum posts, blog comments, social sites, etc), I would imagine you should look just fine in the eyes of Google.