Textarea in the paragraph or plain text

I have a form where a user is able to comment via a textarea. If the submit button is clicked it returns the value of what is entered in the textarea inside a textarea. How can I change this it so that on submit the value of the textarea is returned as a plain text/paragraph with jquery or php?

The code for textarea and button:

<textarea rows="6" cols="40" scroll="auto" name="reply_for_{$item.id}">
    {if isset($item.reply)}
        {$item.reply}
    {/if}
</textarea>
<br />
<input name="addcomment" value="{lang mkey='submit'}" type="button" onclick="
    document.forms['commentsFrm'].id.value={$item.id};
    document.forms['commentsFrm'].submit();
"/>

---

$('input[name="addcomment"]').on('click',function(){
     var comment = $('textarea').val();
     $('textarea').remove(); // removes the textarea
     var actContent = $(this).parent().html(); // get the actual content of the parent dom node.
     $(this).parent.html('<p>'+comment+'</p>'+actContent); // you set the new html content for the parent dom node

});

So this would take the textarea content and save it into a paragraph. A bit akward solution but it should do the magic.