What do these terms mean in Writing?

Question

1.Patchwrite

2.Auto-summarize

Thanks!!

Answer 1

Patchwriting is when you essentially plagiarize a section of text, but slightly modify the order of things. It is usually unintentional plagiarism on the part of a student, seen as a failure of teachers to communicate how critical quotation marks are or illustrate ways to use the ideas without plagiarizing.

See: A Comment on "Plagiarisms, Authorships, and the Academic Death Penalty" by Barbara Welch in College English, Vol. 58, No. 7 (Nov., 1996), pp. 855-858

http://www.jstor.org/pss/378423

Welch says, "...students whose reading ability is so limited they are reduced to "patchwriting" (what used to be called "interlinear translations" or "ponies" or "cribs," whith some re-arranging of sentence structures) are later seen as capable of closing their books and summarizing sections without consulting them until they are finished." (Which she sees as laughable, because there is a huge gap between those two abilities).

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Auto-summarize is a function in a word processor (like MS Word) that allows you to write an executive summary or abstract, emphasize key points, highlight things, etc. It is in the Tools menu in Word.

Answer 2

Patchwriting:

'cut & paste' plagiarism - using a

sentence or two (or more) from different sources on the Internet and with some slight modification, weaving this

information together into a paper without appropriate citation.

Example:

Original passage:

"One is a medical teaching film showing the birth of a baby; the other is an anthropological documentary of a subincision initiation rite practiced by a primitive Australian group."

Patchwritten passage:

One was a medical teaching film showing a baby's birth; the other was an anthropological documentary of a primitive Australian group's initiation rite which  involved subincision.

Autosummary:

Microsoft Word includes an Auto Summarize option that will automatically create a summary of a document for you. When you select this option, Word will examine the document and highlight the sentences that are most important.You can choose to highlight key points, insert an executive summary or abstract at the top of the document, create a new document, or hide everything but the summary.