CCR 601: Howard, Serviss, Rodrigue (new and improved)

Howard, Serviss, and Rodrigue (2009) present findings from their preliminary inquiry regarding students’ practices of summary, paraphrasing, patchwriting, and copying in source-based writing. Their method consisted of collecting a sample of 18 students’ texts, each written for one source-based research writing project in a sophomore composition course. Every cited source within the students’ texts were found, collected, read, and compared against the language used by the student in order to qualitatively code where and how students used sources. Results indicated that (a) most students’ texts had at least one instance each of patchwriting, paraphrase, direct copying with quotations, and direct copying without quotations; (b) not a single incidence of summary arose in the sample; (c) most used un-cited “non-common knowledge information”; and (d) most inaccurately attributed information to sources. From these results, they conclude that “students are not writing from sources; they are writing from sentences selected from sources” (14). Since their results may not be representative of larger populations of student writers Howard, Serivss, and Rodrigue call for additional research to be developed on this important topic—an endeavor they reveal they have already initiated.