ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on why writers sometimes fail to produce entirely original prose when they are working with cited sources; what that prose—termed "patchwriting", "misuse of sources", or "unintentional plagiarism" in many US academic honesty policies—looks like; and what people can learn from it. It encourages the development of the pedagogies and mentoring strategies necessary to avoid these failures in the future. The chapter first explores what people consider to be transgressive, why they consider it so, how it is manifested in academic texts at different levels of sophistication, and how their responses might be more generative at those different levels. It locates intertextuality practices within ethical/unethical or original/plagiarized binaries. Studies of professional writers and college professors add to the picture. Provisional research by Maja Curcic and Georgi Boychev reveals a similar frequency of patchwriting in texts produced by professional writers as by college students.
