What is Standard mode?
Standard mode is the safe default. It rewrites your paragraph for clarity and rhythm while keeping your voice intact: the same register you came in with, the same level of formality, roughly the same sentence shapes. What changes is the wording that wasn't pulling its weight — a tired verb, a clause that doubled back on itself, a transition doing too much work. What stays is the way you write.
This is the mode to pick when nothing is wrong with your paragraph, exactly. It just isn't tight. You'd fix it yourself given another pass, but you've already read it five times and the better verb isn't coming. Paste it into the paragraph rewriter, leave the mode on Standard, and read three alternates side by side.
When to use Standard mode
Standard is the right pick when the paragraph is fine in tone and length and you only want it sharper. You wrote a Slack message, a paragraph in a doc, a section of a blog post, and on rereading it sounds clunky in a way you can't pinpoint. Standard at Medium strength is the move.
It's also the right default when you don't know which other mode to pick. If the paragraph is already in roughly the register you want, Standard will keep it there. If the length is roughly right, Standard won't move it much.
Where Standard is the wrong call: when the paragraph is in the wrong register (too stiff, too casual) or the wrong length (too long, too thin). For those, jump to Casual, Formal, Shorten, or Expand — those modes are tuned to push the output in a specific direction. Standard is tuned to leave it where it is and only clean the surface.
How Standard mode compares to other modes
Formal raises the register; Casual lowers it. Academic adds hedged precision and strips marketing energy. Shorten cuts roughly in half; Expand grows roughly 1.5×. Standard does none of those things on purpose. It edits at the wording level and keeps register, length, and structure close to what you came in with.
The closest cousin is Standard at Aggressive strength versus Casual at Subtle — both will give you something cleaner without much register shift. The difference: Casual will reach for contractions and conversational verbs even at low strength; Standard won't unless your input already used them.
When should you switch off Standard? When the second-best Standard rewrite still sounds wrong in the same direction (too stiff, too long, too thin). That's a signal the issue isn't wording — it's register or length, and a different mode is the right tool.