Revised Author’s Note

Section 1. Reflecting on your writing process

How did you begin? What was your reading process like? What about planning/drafting?

We began by answering the necessary questions are summary needed to answer and then
planned out what our paragraphs were going to talk about. For our reading process, we wrote
notes and made annotations to understand the source text first before writing our essay. For our
2nd draft, we each revised the paragraphs that we wrote and then read through and edited the
other person’s writing.

Section 2. What part of this writing assignment are you struggling with? Can
you highlight 2 or 3 specific places in your draft for your partner to offer feed-
back on?

Try to avoid “grammar” and “format” as one of these three things. In our writing groups, we are focusing on the higher order
concerns like analysis and synthesis. However, if you do feel like you need assistance with grammar, please feel free to set up an
appointment with me or contact the Writing Center.

What part of writing project 1 are you strug- What specific places in your draft show this
gling with? struggle?

1. Collaborating - Having different voices Throughout paragraphs, writing style may

and styles of writing, and learning how shift depending on who wrote what
to merge them

2. Using evidence in effective way Paragraphs 2-5

Section 3. What part of this writing are you feeling good about?

We feel good about addressing the main argument of the essay. Both of us had similar thoughts
on the text so it was easy to come to an agreement on what to write about and how to delegate it.
We also feel confident about the revisions we made to make our essay more persuasive and ef-
fective.
Your writing task
In pairs, write a 1000 word summary of Rebecca Moore Howard’s “Plagiarisms, Authorships, and the Ac-
ademic Death Penalty.” This should be a clear, fair, and accurate summary of the article – one that con-
veys your general understanding of the piece, including nuances, and the main points. In creating your
summary, be very judicious in including details, examples, and repetition. You may change the order of
the argument, but do not add commentary. When you interpret complicated ideas, try to be as careful and
thoughtful as possible.

Questions that your summary should answer

● What is the purpose of the essay? Who is Howard’s audience?
○ To spark the argument that plagiarism has educational value to it
○ Academic institutions, writers, students, teachers, professors, etc.
● Why does Howard believe she needs to present her argument. The ideas we read about in
Writing Analytically will help you out here. What analysis, evidence, presumptions, etc. is
Howard responding to in writing her argument?
○ She needs to present her argument because many people in the writing community have
an idea that she doesn’t agree with and wants to challenge how schools perceive plagia-
rism
○ Howard is responding to the presumption that plagiarism is completely wrong and bad
for students. The majority of academic institutions believe all form of plagiarism is
purely a form of cheating and theft with no educational value.
● What are the main supporting points of her argument?
○There’s a positive and negative side to plagiarism.
○Depending on the student’s intentions, university policies should educate students of how
to cure plagiarism instead of punishing them.
○ Patchwriting helps students understand difficult material but shouldn’t be used in final
drafts that students submit.
○ Collaborative writing is essential to student learning.
● What key details or evidence does Howard present to support her main ideas?
○ Getting quotes/opinions from multiple different authors to show more perspective pg
794-795
○ Referencing today’s technological advances and how hypertext is changing the individual
authorship pg 791
○ Using MLK speech as an example “voice merging” which can be considered a type of
plagiarism to argue that not all plagiarism is necessarily bad pg. 792
○ Using other studies to show positive effects of patchwriting pg. 788
■ Glynda Hull and Mike Rose
Be sure to write your summary as well organized paragraphs.

“Plagiarisms, Authorships, and the Academic Death Penalty” Summary

Rebecca Moore Howard’s “Plagiarisms, Authorships, and the Academic Death Penalty”

is a complex, academic essay that questions the controversial concept and misconception of aca-

demic plagiarism. She attempts to convince academic institutions, writers, students, and profes-

sors that some forms of plagiarism have pedagogical value and that the penalty for plagiarism

needs to be revised. In her essay, Howard explains how there is a common misconception in the

academic community that all forms of plagiarism should be severely punished. The majority of

academic institutions and professors hold a strong belief that plagiarism is purely a form of

cheating and theft with no educational value. They associate and generalize plagiarism to acts of

pure academic dishonesty, such as students copying each others’ homework, buying papers, and

stealing sources of text to put in their essays directly without citing. Howard argues that as a con-

sequence, these schools and teachers stay ignorant to the possibility that their students uninten-

tionally plagiarize due to a lack of knowledge about proper citing or subject material, and utilizes

her essay to introduce her stance on the positives and pedagogical benefits of the practice.

Through this essay, Howard utilizes several rhetorical arguments to spark the idea that

plagiarism does have positive educational value. Howard argues that plagiarism can be a learning

tool instead of a crime by using historical references. For example, in the quote, “Miller argues

that Martin Luther King Jr. was engaged in ‘voice merging’ -- the African-American folk

preaching tradition of patching together unattributed words, phrases, and even extended passages

from theological sources… He attributes King’s ‘plagiarism’ to the oral traditions of King’s pri-

mary community,” (Howard 792). Howard is able to use Martin Luther King’s historical
speeches as a reference to a positive form of plagiarism. Howard uses MLK to engage the read-

ers in the idea that historical figures have used what some refer to as plagiarism to connect, moti-

vate, and strengthen communities together. This evidence shows that plagiarism can have an ed-

ucational value or a greater purpose and that not all forms of plagiarism can hurt the writing

community.

Another point that Howard makes to convince academic institutions to revise their strict

policies toward plagiarism is that students have different intentions when plagiarizing. She ad-

dresses the issue of how plagiarism policies in school fail to take into account the student’s inten-

tions, penalizing the student even if he or she was ignorant of their actions. Although a number

of students do purposely plagiarize as a form of cheating and academic dishonesty, many unin-

tentionally plagiarize because they lacked the knowledge to properly cite and quote their sources

when using other texts directly. The author argues that it’s not the student’s fault for not knowing

how to cite properly but rather, the teacher’s fault for failing to educate his students about the

topic. She references author Margaret Kantz and writes, “Kantz assumes that student papers

strive to present ‘original arguments’ (75), she believes that student plagiarism results from

teachers' poor task representations (84), rather than from either of the two causes to which pla-

giarism is traditionally ascribed - a lack of morality or an ignorance of citation conventions”

(Howard 795). Therefore, Howard proposes that this issue could be easily fixed without punish-

ing students by giving a simple lesson on how to cite and quote sources correctly, stating, “. . . a

student's inexperience with conventions of academic writing, instruction in source attribution and

subsequent revision of the paper may be the instructor's most appropriate response” (Howard

799). She then further expands on the pedagogical benefits of certain types of plagiarism, such as

patchwriting.
 Howard introduces the idea of patchwriting in her essay, a textual strategy that’s com-

monly classified as plagiarism, to show the educational usefulness of some forms of plagiarism.

“Patchwriting,” she writes, “ involves ‘copying from a source text and then deleting some words,

altering grammatical structures, or plugging in one-for-one synonym-substitutes’ (Howard 233)”

(Howard 788). She establishes the possibility of students having educational and commendable

reasons for engaging in patchwriting, arguing that many feel the need to patchwrite due to their

unfamiliarity and lack of understanding on the subject material they are writing about. In this

case, patchwriting gives students a starting point in their writing process by allowing them to

paraphrase and interpret the source in their own words, which helps them better comprehend the

subject material. Howard references studies that suggest that patchwriting can help students, “. . .

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 mem-

bership in a discourse community,” (Howard 788). Howard convinces the readers that if patch-

writing is used in the correct way, instead of being a form of plagiarism that hurts both the origi-

nal author and the student, it can be used as an educational tool that helps spark ideas within

writers who have yet grasped the main idea of the text. Thus, this form of plagiarism should be

treated as a vital and positive part of the student’s learning process rather than a dishonest crime.

To further aid students in their writing processes, teachers should give further detailed instruction

in quotation and source acknowledgment as well as provide revisions and suggestions for previ-

ous drafts.

Plagiarism is a serious “crime” because in the process you can cheat, lie, and discredit

someone’s original work. In the academic system, people who commit plagiarism can receive

anything from a failing grade to expulsion from their academic institution. Plagiarism is also
dangerous for writers who chose to plagiarize because it takes away from the person’s individu-

alism and expression of their self-thoughts. However, though plagiarism has a negative reputa-

tion, forms once considered plagiarism, like patchwriting can hold academic value when used in

pedological manner. In her essay, Howard is able to propose a new policy for plagiarism, a pol-

icy in which, “patchwriting is not always a form of academic dishonesty… patchwriting can ac-

tually help the learner begin to understand the unfamiliar material,” (Howard 799). With this pol-

icy students and other writers will be able to use patchwriting as a source of help and guidance.

By using patchwriting to understand an idea, writers may be able to develop new ideas about the

reading that they may have never acknowledged before. As we begin to step into a new age of

writing, with hyperlinks and ebooks, Howard challenges us to question how institutions will

begin to make new standards to writing and if the standards we have already are outdated.

Word Count: 1088

 Works Cited

Howard, Rebecca Moore. “Plagiarisms, Authorships, and the Academic Death Penalty.” Col-

lege English, vol. 57, no. 7, 1995, pp. 788–806. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/sta-

ble/378403. 20 Sept. 2018