Plagiarism

For this week, we were required to read "Plagiarisms, Authorships, and the Academic Death Penalty" by Rebecca Moore Howard. Rebecca Moore Howard, an assistant professor in the Department of Interdisciplinary Writing at Colgate University, teaches composition, rhetoric, and linguistics. In the introduction, Howard mentions a term I have never head before but still am aware of; patchwriting. Patchwriting is defined as "copying from a source text and then deleting some words, altering grammatical structures, or plugging in one-for-one synonym-substitutes" (Howard 233).

SIDE NOTE: this is the first time I have seen someone other than myself named Tanya in a text.

Anyways, I can admit to patchwrting once or twice in my lifetime. Teachers used to stress the importance of not copying a quote or source WORD BY WORD, so changing up some of the word choice negates plagiarism right? Howard says no, which admittedly bursts my bubble a little bit. I thought it was interesting that Howard suggested that plagiarism avoidance could be better instituted if it wasn't constantly put in such a negative light and could be seen with a positive spin. As a PR major, I can definitely understand this. Off that tangent, a quote that Howard used to argue her stance was: "A dwarf standing on the shoulders of a giant may see farther than a giant himself." I found this quote to be interesting because she was referring Authority as the giant and us consumers as the dwarfs. This suggests that it should be allowed for students or literature consumers to take the information they find and put it to use. By putting found sources and information, some students can take the subject further than the original source could.

Howard also mentions that Giles Constable, a historian, said that: "The term plagiarism should indeed probably be dropped in reference to the Middle Ages"