Writing from Sources and Sentence-Level Patchwriting

Overview and Methodology

• An inquiry evaluated source-use practices across 18 anonymous student research papers drawn from 15 sections of a required sophomore writing course in Spring 2007 at a large, private, comprehensive doctoral university.

• Source usage was categorized into four distinct techniques:

  • Summary: Restating and compressing the main points of a paragraph or more in fresh language, reducing passage length by at least 50%.

  • Paraphrase: Restating a passage in fresh language without significant reduction in length.

  • Patchwriting: Copying from a source text while deleting words, altering grammatical structures, or substituting one-for-one synonyms.

  • Copying: Exact transcription of source text, regardless of whether quotation marks or citations are present.

Key Findings on Student Source Use

• Summary usage: 0 out of 18 papers (0%) contained any instances of summary.

• Paraphrase usage: 18 out of 18 papers (100%) contained instances of paraphrase.

• Patchwriting prevalence: 16 out of 18 papers (89%) contained instances of patchwriting.

• Direct copying: 14 out of 18 papers (78%) contained direct copying.

• Unmarked direct copying: 13 out of 18 papers (72%) contained direct copying without quotation marks.

• Missing citations: 17 out of 18 papers (94%) contained non-common-knowledge information without a source citation.

• Misattribution and inaccuracies: 14 out of 18 papers (78%) attributed information to a source that either lacked that information or contradicted what was written.

Sentence-Level Writing and Source Comprehension

• Writers frequently select isolated sentences from sources rather than engaging with and synthesizing full source texts.

• Working exclusively at the sentence level places writers in constant danger of patchwriting and inadvertent plagiarism.

• The total absence of summary indicates a lack of demonstrated holistic source comprehension and critical reading.

• Source-use difficulties affect writers across expertise levels; Roig (2001) found that when summarizing complex texts from unfamiliar fields, 22% of psychology professors patchwrote and 24% distorted the original meaning.

Pedagogical and Research Implications

• Academic integrity policies often classify patchwriting as plagiarism, whereas composition scholarship identifies it as a transitional stage in learning to write from sources.

• Instruction focused solely on citation mechanics does not address underlying difficulties with reading comprehension, vocabulary, and background knowledge.

• The Citation Project (CitationProject.net) was created as a large-scale, multi-campus study to analyze source use, source comprehension, and the relationship between summary and reading practices.