It is often claimed that, in at least some areas of language use, the relation between form and content is such that any attempt at reformulation or paraphrase amounts to a distortion of the significance of the original wording. In this article, I set out to vindicate an undemanding yet nontrivial conception of paraphrase. According to the rhetorical relations account of textual cohesion proposed, the meaning specifications required by a collection of sentences in order to constitute a text pave the way for a kind of reformulation which is in solidarity with the possibility of paraphrase. I substantiate my approach with prosaic and poetic examples from Woolf and Dickinson, respectively.