Lost Meaning Through Lost Words

It comes to me as strange the idea of paraphrasing being bad. It’s the student’s dream, you can use your own words, cut out everything you don’t feel the need to share, and can really help any research paper. But after today’s classes I can see that we lose something through paraphrase. While many hymns have become classics in today’s day and age, we don’t realize sometimes what the original structure contained that history has forgotten in the efforts to learn the more famous version. It is as if a light has been shed on me that maybe we need the context and original word choice to get the original message across. Maybe a shortened version doesn’t always mean a better version. At what point do we say enough is enough and get back to our roots, back to the original texts of human history? There is an odd comfort to think about a higher level of beauty than we can achieve through paraphrasing, and it pushes me to believe that we can be a better society if only we try.