I believe the idea behind "rewrite a well-written article in another form" is to focus your mind upon analyzing, breaking down, and emulating Good Writing. You'll be closely reading the work of someone better than you, rather than taking your own writing and trying to improve it without any real models of what would be better.
Which would a novice programmer learn more from: blindly using whatever sort function their standard library provides; flailing around until they invent something like bubble sort and trying to optimize it; or reading about a few sort algorithms, picking one, and implementing it in their language of choice?
(A pro, of course, would probably either use stdlib's sort, or know where to find a library of multiple sorts that someone spent days tweaking for amazing performance within various constraints.)
Which would a novice programmer learn more from: blindly using whatever sort function their standard library provides; flailing around until they invent something like bubble sort and trying to optimize it; or reading about a few sort algorithms, picking one, and implementing it in their language of choice?
(A pro, of course, would probably either use stdlib's sort, or know where to find a library of multiple sorts that someone spent days tweaking for amazing performance within various constraints.)