Plagiarism

What is Patchwriting?

Patchwriting, which is also referred to as mosaic plagiarism, is a term originally coined by Rebecca Moore Howard. The term refers to the situation in which writers use material derived from another source, but rather than quoting the material directly, change the wording or word order slightly before including it in their own work. (See Howard's original article: "Plagiarisms, Authorships, and the Academic Death Penalty", published in College English 57.7 (1995): 788-806  in JSTOR DOI: 10.2307/378403.)

Patchwriting includes:

• situations where a writer merely deletes some words from an included text but doesn't indicate the portions that are directly quoted
• situations where a writer substitutes synonyms (words or phrases) for some words or phrases in an included text without indicating directly quoted material
• situations where a writer varies the grammatical structure slightly from the original text, but retains the character and language of the original text.
• combinations of all three of the above

Patchwriting is essentially inadequate paraphrase or summary. 

Bate's University provides a useful interactive example of patchwriting (termed Mosaic Plagiarism in their case). They also provide a tab demonstrating an effective paraphrase of the same source (click on the tab at the top). Additional useful sites are listed to the left.

Writing researchers generally consider that many instances of patchwriting are examples of Unintentional Plagiarism that reflect the writer's difficulty in fully understanding the original source material or the standards of appropriate source use. As such, patchwriting, while still constituting plagiarism, might not indicate academic dishonestly. 

In fact, patchwriting can be used as a tool to improve students' understanding of difficult material. The University of Michigan's Sweetland Center for Writing explains how this can work in an excellent essay complete with several examples.