Patchwriting, Plagiarism, Pedagogy: Definitions and Implications

Definitions of plagiarism tend to be bound up in discussions of how to avoid it, with pedagogical responses locked in a binary with ethical responses. One way to understand the shifting definitions is to tease out the various source-use pedagogies and the responses to incorrect or inadequate citation. Prior to the 1970s, student writers were advised to incorporate the ideas of others in either summary or quotation; as instruction in paraphrase began to be added as a third method, the definition was often in conflict with the models provided and the emphasis was on citation not originality. With the move in the 1990s from pedagogies attending to the text to penalties for students who misused sources came the recognition that sometimes when students produce something that looks like paraphrase, they are actually drawing too heavily on the words of the source and according to some are plagiarizing. The resulting text has been called patchwriting, cryptomnesia, unconscious plagiarism, and non-prototypical plagiarism, along with multiple subcategories, and the definition often shapes the response. The term most common in the United States, patchwriting, locates the transgression in the text – the writing – not in the student and their ethical development. The binary between literacy skills and ethical standards is at the heart of conversations about patchwriting, especially cited patchwriting, and is also appearing in conversations about AI-generated text. This chapter explores these definitions and the pedagogical responses made possible when patchwriting is removed from the category “plagiarism” with its attendant focus on ethics, and attention is refocused on writing skills.