Who's cheating whom in college writing instruction? This book argues that through binary privileging of the "real" author (the inspired, autonomous genius) over the transgressive writer (the collaborator or the plagiarist), composition pedagogy deprives students of important opportunities to join in scholarly discourse and assume authorial roles. From Plato's paradoxical dependence on and rejection of Homer, to Jerome McGann's dismissal of copyright as the "hand of the dead," Standing in the Shadow of Giants surveys changes and conflicts in Western theories of authorship. From this survey emerges an account of how and why plagiarism became important to academic culture; how and why current pedagogical representations of plagiarism contradict contemporary theory of authorship; why the natural, necessary textual strategy of patchwriting is mis-classified as academic dishonesty; and how teachers might craft pedagogy that authorizes student writing instead of criminalizing it.
Rebecca Moore Howard, Professor of Writing and Rhetoric at Syracuse University, has devoted her career to figuring out how to improve the teaching of advanced literacy practices, so that college students have the best possible opportunities for becoming better readers, writers, and critical thinkers. Published in a number of books and articles, her work on the question of how academic culture defines plagiarism has urged instructors to recognize that "patchwriting"----too-close paraphrase----stems from students' literacy rather than from their ethics. That work has also encouraged college instructors to teach summary, paraphrase, and a creative range of rhetorical engagements with complex written texts.
She is now a principal investigator in the Citation Project, a national study of college students' work with source texts. That work demonstrates that when instruction focuses on the forms and conventions of academic research, students tend to produce only the forms and conventions, without authentic engagement with the source texts. This work, now being disseminated, urges that research be taught as dialogue and inquiry rather than just adherence to conventions.
All of her scholarship and research informs the textbooks she publishes, books that offer students frameworks and practices for becoming more effective rhetors.
