Tautologies in student essays, arguments that most commonly assume the truth or self-evidence of themselves without relationship to something other than themselves, can be identified whenever an essay contains a series of nonsuccessive, noncumulative discourse units. Three kinds of tautologies in student papers are tautologies of redundancy, tautologies of substitution, and tautologies of agency. Some solutions are (1) using the ways of defining--opposing, comparing differentiating, and translating; (2) comparing summaries and paraphrases in terms of distinctions made, concepts formed, and inclusivity; (3) having a transformational sense of words and sentences; and (4) breaking equivalency chains by examining assumptions underlying the assertion of equivalency and by emphasizing differences. (EL)