Plagiarism policy

in courses taught by
Rebecca Moore Howard

Work you submit for this course must have been written by you for this course. You may not submit work in this course and in another (except with permission from me and the other instructor), and you may not submit under your name work written entirely or in part by someone else (unless you cite and document the source and mark quotations).

Patchwriting is copying from a source text and then deleting some words, altering grammatical structures, or plugging in one-for-one synonym-substitutes. If you submit work that is patchwritten, you will have done poor writing and will get a commensurately poor grade. I do not, however, treat incidents of patchwriting as academic dishonesty unless I have some reason to believe that you intended to deceive your readers. It is difficult to write from sources without patchwriting, and the better you can summarize without patchwriting, the better you will understand what you are reading. For this reason, I teach writing from sources and summary techniques, and I welcome opportunities to work with students who want to acquire these skills.

Last updated 5 July 2009

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The policy of Syracuse University:

The policy for my courses is consonant with the the academic integrity policy instituted at Syracuse in July 2006. If you have not already seen that policy, you should download and read it. Here is the definition of "plagiarism" contained in that policy:

Plagiarism is the use of someone else's language, ideas, information, or original material without acknowledging the source.
Examples of plagiarism:

i. Paper is downloaded from an Internet source and/or obtained from a paper mill.
ii. Paper contains part or all of the writings of another person (including another student), without citation.
iii. Paper contains passages that were cut and pasted from an Internet source, without citation.