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Original sentence: Students frequently overuse direct quotations in taking notes, and as a result, they overuse quotations in the final [research] paper (Lester, 2023).

Paraphrased sentence: Students should take just a few notes in direct quotations from sources to help minimize the amount of quoted material in a research paper (Lester, 2023).

The original sentence is clearly in the assertive mood. However, has the original sentence been paraphrased correctly? The paraphrased sentence seems to be in the imperative mood. I think that the paraphrased is flawed as the mood has been changed. Also, the paraphrased sentence seems to express slightly different ideas. The original sentence say that students take too many direct quotations in their notes while the paraphrased sentence says that students should take a few notes in direction quotations. Firstly, the paraphrased sentence is not justified in assuming that the original sentence considers "a few" to be the right amount. The original sentence might mean 100 to be the right amount in which case 101 would be overusage. Secondly, "overuse direct quotations in taking notes" and "take just a few notes in direct quotations" mean slightly different things. The former means that the note might contain materials other than direct quotatios, but The latter means that only direct quotations are taken as notes.

Is my evaluation appropriate?

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    The paraphrase doesn't really work.
    – Lambie
    Commented Jul 18, 2023 at 18:53
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    The paraphrase misrepresents the original, which does not advise students to make value judgements at the time of taking their lecture notes, but when they write up their thesis. As such, paraphrasing with an introduced imperative is incorrect.
    – Weather Vane
    Commented Jul 18, 2023 at 19:01
  • If 100 is a good amount, 101 is not, in ordinary use, overuse. And the paraphrase is good advice, but not a paraphrase. Even "Do not overuse" is not a paraphrase, though it's closer to the original meaning. As should is not an instruction, it does not define the imperative - maybe imperious (= Why, thank you for your opinion on the subject!)
    – Yosef Baskin
    Commented Jul 18, 2023 at 19:35
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    What was the goal of "paraphrasing" it? Determining if two sentences have exactly the same meaning is, in general, impossible.
    – alphabet
    Commented Jul 18, 2023 at 20:39
  • Unfortunately this question is too vague to answer. Where did the paraphrase come from? Why are you paraphrasing? What do you actually want (to prove someone wrong, or to learn?) You can have a loose paraphrase which communicates the same information or a close paraphrase which matches the language, words, grammatical structure. For instance "Stay out of the water!" and "One of the college rules is that students must not play in the pond." Different paraphrases suit different situations.
    – Stuart F
    Commented Jul 18, 2023 at 22:33

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No. If should is used, the sentence can't be imperative.

Imperative sentences like

  • Get out of here. Wash the dishes. Sit down, please. Don't pay any attention to him.

have special syntactic restrictions, which make them easy to recognize. And the fact that they're called "imperative" doesn't mean that they always are orders, and it doesn't mean that anything that is an order is an imperative. That's a matter of Pragmatics, not syntax.

Real imperatives

  1. normally have missing subjects (though you can appear, if stressed)
  2. have second-person subjects (hence Hit yourself, but not *Hit himself)
  3. use only infinitive (i.e, present, except for be) verbs in the verb phrase
    (this is why should can't be an imperative; modals have no infinitive or present tense verb forms)

You will have been taught that imperatives are always orders. No, they're not; and lots of things that aren't imperative can be orders, too.

A term that is useful to cover all the kinds of sentence that can be thought of as orders is Impositive, which applies to any utterance that intends to impose a condition or obligation on the addressee. Imperative, by contrast, is strictly a syntactic term and doesn't necessarily refer to meaning or usage.

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  • They can have third person subjects too: "Everybody stand up!" and "Don't everybody clap at once" or "Don't anyone move!" [And, those can't really be thought of as present tense forms, really, because they lack any subject verb agreement]
    – Araucaria - Him
    Commented Jul 18, 2023 at 22:57
  • They have second person agreement. Try it with a singular: Somebody stand(*s) up! 2nd person verb, not third singular.
    – John Lawler
    Commented Jul 18, 2023 at 23:01
  • But why should the verb be second person if the subject is third person singular, as with everybody? Surely, it's just not present tense, it's the plain form/infinitive/base form?
    – Araucaria - Him
    Commented Jul 18, 2023 at 23:03
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    The subject is second person, as I said. The quantifiers are in apposition with the missing you.
    – John Lawler
    Commented Jul 18, 2023 at 23:04
  • 3
    Don’t Everybody stand up and Everybody be on time share the same verb form — that is, the bare infinitive?
    – Tinfoil Hat
    Commented Jul 19, 2023 at 3:02

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