Paraphrasing

Paraphrasing means to restate a text or passage in your own words. To rewrite a statement in your own words is to show that you fully understand it. Simply changing a few of the author’s words is not paraphrasing.

As I have come to express it, neither teachers nor students are willing to undertake “risks for understanding”; instead, they content themselves with safer “correct-answer compromises.” Under such compromises, both teachers and students consider the education to be a success if students are able to provide answers that have been sanctioned as correct. Of course, in the long run, such a compromise is not a happy one, for genuine understandings cannot come about so long as one accepts ritualized, rote, or conventionalized performances.

All of the following sentences are paraphrases of the above quote. Pick the one you think is the best paraphrase:

1. If students and teachers take risks, they will be safer and more content in their future lives.

 
2. Neither today’s educators, nor the students in their classes seem willing to take risks when working to understand something, but instead they find it safer to concentrate on getting what they believe are the “right” answers.

 
3. When learning something new, few people seem to be comfortable taking a change on getting something wrong, even if risking failure brings the potential for greater comprehension.

 
4. Students are too often concerned with getting the “right answer.”

—Adapted with permission from Hunter College's online Task 1 tutorial (http://rwc.hunter.cuny.edu/cpe-doc/index.html),
The Reading Writing Center, Hunter College, CUNY