I didn’t expect how much this hurt.

You can take some text and apply some function to it, say “summarize” or “paraphrase” and you have an idea of what to do.

What do you do when you are asked to take some text and “express it in your own words”? I don’t know what this means. Let me turn it around to give you an example. Let’s say given some text A I come up with text B that is “in my own words”. How do you test that? How different does B have to be from A? How similar do they have to be to ensure B reflects A in some way? If you assign this task to multiple people, you not only expect different results, you *want* different results as if it is unheard of to have people apply the same poorly defined “in your own words” function to text A.

As to the hurt? I have a rather intense case of imposter syndrome. I didn’t grow up in an environment that was particularly interested in what I had to say. Everyone else was far more interested in talking about what was on their minds than being interested in what I had to contribute. So I learned to shut up. I don’t have my own words.

Extra Notes:

The procedure I’m approaching when I encounter this now is to review the material, close it so I’m not referring to it, then write my thoughts on it. Then compare to determine if I’m missing relevant details.

However, it still feels like there is a fundamental issue when you think about making information concise but unique; the concise configurations one can have of words about a topic that conveys information minimizes words increasing the likelihood of non-uniqueness amongst others going through the same operation.