Aron Rivas

Rebecca Moore Howard believes in today's age, forms of plagiarism can be beneficial by
developing writing skills and helping with understanding written work. In “Plagiarisms,
Authorships, and the Academic Death Penalty”, Howard explores the history of plagiarism, how
it has evolved, and how its negative connotation should be dismissed as it can be beneficial to
students. A form of plagiarism called patchwriting “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 explains how patchwriting enables a writer to
build off the ideas of their community and fully understand the material. Howard treats
patchwriting as a learning tool and believes banning this type of plagiarism hinders the learning
process of writers.
Howard also states that the idea of plagiarism and authorship is relatively a new concept
in our society. It began with technological advancements in printers. Printers enabled the public
to create and sell many forms of writing. With this, some individuals would buy a certain copy of
an article from a vendor and print out many copies to sell themselves as their own property. This
caused the government to step in and they created copyright laws to protect the original authors'
texts. As with the advancements in printers in the past, in today's age computers have introduced
a new set of textual values through hypertext. Hypertext consists of readers constantly
contributing to a text, therefore a hypertext is never really finished and it doesn't label who
contributed what.
Adding to the idea that plagiarism evolves through time, plagiarism can also have
different definitions within different communities. Howard uses Martin Luther King Jr.’s work
as an example. MLK used “voice merging” which is an African-American folk preaching
tradition that uses specific phrases from religious books or other sermons. Voice merging was
not considered as plagiarism in MLK’s community as it may have been considered plagiarism in
other communities.
Howard goes into how institutional policy restricts teachers from using the benefits of
certain plagiarisms to help their students. Policies are usually written in a way that prohibits all
kinds of plagiarism and directly accuses the students of moral wrongdoing. Howard recommends
that institutions change their policy in a way that determines the reasoning and motivations
behind the plagiarism. Howard then provides a possible new policy that an institution can adopt.
In this new policy, it considers cheating as turning in someone else’s work under your name and
is punishable by being failed or suspended. Non-attribution is also punishable by a fail or
suspension but it makes it clear that if students don't have the skills to attribute the teacher should
teach them how to do so. Finally, it considers patchwriting as acceptable as long as it is not
submitted as the final document and is not used with the intent of deceiving, if it is, it can be
punishable with a fail or suspension. Howard ends the essay by reflecting on how plagiarism
changes throughout time and institutions should be ready and willing to change their policies in
order to make sure students are able to succeed.