S6A Redefining peer review practices integrating rhetorical strategies to promote plagiarism avoidance

Presenters

Aysan Kolahdouzipour, English

Abstract

Unintentional plagiarism has long been an unresolved issue: how can instructors help students to avoid what they didn’t intend to do so? One factor contributing to this problem is patchwriting. Essentially when a text is challenging or difficult to comprehend, patchwriting occurs because students only make minor changes and keep the original text and style. Writing scholar Rebecca Moore Howard, describes patchwriting as a “summary technique” and links it too “writes who are experiencing difficulty with comprehension”. While reviewing patchwriting as a symptom of an “in-progress” or developing writing can help teachers be more understanding of the error, we still need instructional activities that can help students that will help them to recognize patchwriting and to value deep engagement with source-text. In this presentation, I briefly describe an approach to integrating identification of patchwriting into peer review activities.

As instructors design peer review guidelines (Byland, 2004, p.61) they should also consider how they can integrate identification of patchwriting or sloppy source integration into this activity. After all, peer review is an opportunity for students to build their rhetorical reading strategies by critically reading and analyzing their peer’s paper. This approach encourages students to go beyond grammar or copyediting a peer’s papers, and to instead evaluate source integration details and accuracy of source use. In this presentation, I will share an example of peer review guidelines I have developed that include attention to source integration and patchwriting.

Session Recording

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