Reading Response - Howard

Standing in the Shadow of Giants begins with Rebecca More Howard’s crusade against plagiarism in the ‘80s. The specific form of plagiarism she has focused on is patchwriting which she defines as “copying from a source text and then deleting some words, altering grammatical structures, or plugging in one synonym for another” (xvii). To her surprise, however, she found that most students she discussed this form of plagiarism with did not know that what they were doing was plagiarism. Howard ultimately questioned the transgression herself until she came to the conclusion that patchwriting is “the heart of writing” (7). Building on Quintilian’s theory and the work of Roland Barthes, Howard says that all writing is to some extent collaborative and built on the works of earlier writers. There is no individual author in the sense that patchwriting is a "writer-text collaboration based on mimesis" (34). Here she also looks at the works of Foucault and Woodmansee to examine our modern conception of the author.

One of the key quotes from the second part of Standing in the Shadow of Giants is "the autonomous, originary author derives from economic and technological change and participates in maintaining hierarchical social relations that are potentially threatened by those changes” (57). It is this idea of authorship that makes patchwriting seem negative or criminal and prohibits "a positive pedagogy for patchwriting." She goes on to describe how this idea of authorship is, in fact, new and cites some of the reading we did earlier in the semester on authorship. Howard also gives us "four properties" of authorship: "autonomy, originality, proprietorship, and morality" (58).

Morality, of course, refers to our need to trust the author has created his own text and not stolen anyone else's work. Proprietorship is the heart of copyright law--it is the basis for intellectual property: that the author owns that idea or work as much as she might own a plot of land. To own that work, however, it must be original. Originality is probably the most debatable among the four properties Howard gives us. The definition or intent is obvious, but determining to what level a work must be original is difficult to do. Howard summarizes autonomy as the idea that "the writer, from the Cartesian point of view, can act autonomously to apprehend and express ideas that are unmediated by social discourse" (80). We've seen the implications of these properties of modern authorship throughout the course in the rhetoric of copyright infringement cases and the arguments by the RIAA and the MPAA, the chief proprietors.

There are problems with plagiarism and how it is regulated and defined in the classroom. Howard talks about how on exams students are expected to (and rewarded for) answer questions based on ideas taught in class that, in terms of proprietorship belong to a different authors, without actually citing them. Even the guidelines used to define plagiarism vary from institution to institution and are considered "a local affair" (21). In many cases, plagiarism is unintentional. In these cases, Howard advocates "[teaching] citation conventions" (110). Intentional plagiarism should be punished. But, as Howard says, in patchwriting, intentional plagiarism is not always the case. Sometimes it is used by writers to help them better "understand what they are reading" and in this case can be used as "a positive learning strategy" (110, 111).