Dialectical Journal: Howard et., al.

Author(s)/title:

Rebecca Moore Howard, Tricia Serviss, and Tanya K. Rodrigue: Writing from Sources, Writing from Sentences

Summary:

In this essay, the authors provide startling findings as they investigate source use in a collection of 18 student papers. They begin with the hypothesis that "college students, both L1 and L2 writers, patchwrite" (179). Patchwriting is a type of summarizing in which a writer cobbles together text by merely switching out words and vaguely changing  grammatical structures. What the authors find goes far beyond their hypothesis. I have included some of these finding in the following dialectical journal. This is an eye opening piece, if you are not already familiar with the debate on plagiarism, this provides a nice transition into the conversation.

Reflection	Quote
So my question is: are these students involved in deliberate deception, or attempting to make moves in their writing they see happening in more sophisticated work? Are they trying to steal or to excel?	“It has become commonplace for students to be described as would-be plagiarists, with unacknowledged copying as their primary strategy of writing from sources” (178).
As defined by Howard: “Copying from a source text and then deleting some words, altering grammatical structures, or plugging in one-for-one synonmy-substitutes” (178).	Patchwriting (178)
The police state in action. Institutions care more about protecting property than students. Why are we so ready to call a student a “moral failure” and face them with charges than we are to interpret what they are doing as signs of an attempt to progress in their writing? How do we start recognizing this phenomenon as a valuable stage in writing development and not always as a case of theft?	“Whereas many institutions’ academic integrity policies classify patchwriting as a form of plagiarism—a moral failure—recent research indicates that it occurs as an intermediate stage between copying and summarizing: inexpert critical readers patchwrite when they attempt to paraphrase of summarize” (179).
Premises for research. L1=native English speakers L2=non-native speakers of English	“Hypotheses: That college students, both L1 and L2 writers, patchwrite” (179).
Questions posed during research	1.       Does the paper contain one of more incidences of patchwriting? 2.       Does the paper contain one or more incidences of paraphrase? 3.       Does the paper contain one of more incidences of summary? 4.       Does the paper contain one of more incidences of direct copying from sources? 5.       Does the paper contain one or more incidences in which direct copying is not marked as quotation? (181)
As defined by the authors: “restating and compressing the main points of a paragraph or more of text in fresh language and reducing the summarized passage by at least 50%” (181)	Summary
As defined by the authors: “restating a passage from a source in fresh language, though sometimes with keywords retained from that passage” (181).	Paraphrasing
As defined by the authors: “the exact transcription (though perhaps with occasional minor errors) or source text.” “Copying, then, can include both quotation and unacknowledged copying. Regardless of whether quotation marks and referenced citation were present or absent, exact copying was classified as copying” (181).	Copying
From the authors findings—I was just blown away by this. As an instructor, this is the blaring red flag screaming in my face to work with my students closer on summarizing.	“Does the paper contain one or more incidences of summary? –In all 18 papers (100%), the answer is “no” (182
Further discoveries—again, these numbers are so out of balance of what I thought they would be. Looking at this data reinforces my idea that students are being thrown more and more unprepared into the college classroom—We can’t just point our fingers at primary and secondary education systems and put the blames on them—what is happening with the academic institution that findings like these are normal and consistent?	“Of the 18 papers, 17 (94%) contained non-common-knowledge information for which no source was cited. Of the 18 papers, 14 (78%) attributed information to a source that either did not contain that information or said something different from what the student was attributing to it” (182)
What steps as instructors do we take to help our students understand what they are reading? More class discussions, dialectical journals, further probing and questioning of assigned articles? This is obviously a problem that we can help with, where do we begin?	“This is our primary concern throughout our analysis of these 18 papers: they cite sentences rather than sources, and one must then ask not only whether the writers understood the source itself but also whether they even read it” (186).
Goes with above	“…the absence of summary, coupled with the exclusive engagement of text on the sentence level, means that readers have no assurance that the students did read and understand” (186).
Goes with above with the added emphasis that working on this superficial level places the student in danger, this is more than a problem of not understanding what they (the student) read, but this lack places them and their academic careers in jeopardy.	“…these students are not writing form sources; they are writing form sentences selected from sources. That leaves the reader with the unanswered question: does this writer understand what s/he has read?” Further, “working exclusively on the sentence level, he or she is perforce always in danger of plagiarizing” (187).
Conclusion Agreed, and how do you even monitor or control this? Do we even want to be charged with controlling this aspect? On one level the student is responsible for their actions and must take charge of their own work, however, we are uniquely positioned to help our students in their endeavors—at what junction do we step in, how do we step in, where is the responsibility?	“From this research, we are left with a compelling question: when writers work from sources, to what extent are the accessing the entire source, and to what extent single sentences from it?” (189).