Plagiarisms, Authorships, and the Academic Death Penalty

Abstract

In composition studies, most published discussions of student plagiarism proceed from the assumption that plagiarism occurs as a result of one of two possible motivations: an absence of ethics or an ignorance of citation conventions. Some students don't appreciate academic textual values and therefore deliberately submit work that is not their own; others don't understand academic citation conventions and therefore plagiarize inadvertently. Both of these are negative interpretations, postulating an absence-of either ethics or knowledge-in the plagiarist. A few recent studies, though, identify positive motivations for patchwriting, a textual strategy that has traditionally been classified as plagiarism. Patchwriting involves "copying from a source text and then deleting some words, altering grammatical structures, or plugging in one-for-one synonym-substitutes" (Howard 233). Describing the textual strategies of Tanya, a student who in traditional pedagogy might be labeled "remedial," Glynda Hull and Mike Rose celebrate her patchwriting as a valuable stage toward becoming an authoritative academic writer: "we depend upon membership in a community for our language, our voices, our very arguments. We forget that we, like Tanya, continually appropriate each other's language to establish group membership, to grow, and to define ourselves in new ways, and that such appropriation is a fundamental part of language use, even as the appearance of our texts belies it" (152).These and other studies describe patchwriting as a pedagogical opportunity, not a juridical problem. They recommend that teachers treat it as an important transitional strategy in the student's progress toward membership in a discourse community. To treat it negatively, as a "problem" to be "cured" or punished, would Rebecca Moore Howard, an assistant professor in the Department of Interdisciplinary Writing at Colgate University, teaches composition, rhetoric, and linguistics. She is at work on Standing in the Shadow of Giants, an extended reflection on the applications of authorship theory to composition pedagogy, to be published by Ablex. With Sandra Jamieson, she is author of The Bedford Guide to Teaching Writing in the Disciplines: An Instructor's Desk Reference (1995). COLLEGE ENGLISH, VOLUME 57, NUMBER 7, NOVEMBER 1995 PLAGIARISMS, AUTHORSHIPS, AND THE ACADEMIC DEATH PENALTYbe to undermine its positive intellectual value, thereby obstructing rather than facilitating the learning process. If teachers are to adopt a positive approach, they must be able to do so within the strictures of their universities' regulations on plagiarism. Those regulations, however, typically describe plagiarism in all its forms as a problem for adjudication, and this generalization leaves teachers little space for pedagogical alternatives. In typical college regulations on plagiarism (which are often grouped under headings wherein plagiarism serves as either a synonym for or a subset of "academic dishonesty"), all forms of plagiarism, including patchwriting, are located o...

Plagiarism in second-language writing

“…That close reliance on sources may be a necessary stage in the development of students' academic writing was suggested as early as in Campbell (1990); this argument has most notably been developed in Howard's (1995;1999) source-based texts (i.e., the products of writing), but also in their conceptualisations of source use within a complex network of related issues, including their views of themselves as authors, their attitudes to knowledge, and the educational practices into which they were socialised. These studies show that L2 students at the patchwriting stage tend to be unaware of the potential problems involved in this practice, although they are concerned about committing plagiarism inadvertently.…”

“…Ison 2012). Plagiarism is also a specific form of language use and has been investigated as a feature which characterises a stage of language development (Howard 1995) or masks the signs of language development (Ask 2007). Given that plagiarism arises in all academic areas, it has been studied in educational contexts both within the area of educational science generally (e.g.…”

“…For example, Plakans & Gebril (2013) found that verbatim repetition of source language correlated negatively with the score on an integrated reading, listening and writing task. Patchwriting, as initially posited by Howard (1995), is a developmental stage, a form of mimesis which facilitates learning.…”

Student beliefs and attitudes about authorial identity in academic writing

“…However, apart from Abasi et al's (2006) work with ESL students, research on student authorial identity has consisted mainly of analyses of cultural and institutional representations of authorship (Howard, 1995), socio-cultural analyses of discourses of writing (Cherry, 1988;Ivanic, 1995;1998), textual analysis of student writing (Henry, 1994), or analyses of the impact of the text on the reader (Hatch et al, 1993), rather than direct evidence about student beliefs and attitudes.…”

Maintaining the reversibility of foldings: Making the ethics (politics) of information technology visible

“…We know that non-native speakers learn to write by using fragments as 'patches' to imitate the vocabulary and structure of expressions as part of their transition to become competent in academic writing (Howard 1993(Howard , 1995Shi 2004;Leki and Carson 1997). This is true not only for non-native speakers, it is also true for native-speaking academics when paraphrasing a difficult-to-understand texteven material within their own discipline.…”