Week 10 — Borrow the Idea, Not the Sentence — Traditional alternative (no AI)

Instructors: publish this instead of the adaptive version if you prefer, and unpublish or delete the adaptive one.

Assignment 9 of the term — audit a patchwritten sentence and replace it with a real paraphrase, integrate a quotation with all four parts, summarize a short source in one sentence, and explain the difference to someone outside the course.

This week you learned the three honest moves — quotation, paraphrase, and summary — the signal phrase and its verb, credit for ideas as well as words, and the cover-the-source test that separates a paraphrase from patchwriting. In Week 2 you learned to summarize a text neutrally in your own words; this week that skill becomes one of the three honest moves. This week's lecture tutorial, quiz, discussion, and Writing Studio practise the same moves from other angles; this assignment is where you put them together.

The task

This week you bring a source into your own sentences without losing track of whose words and ideas are whose. Your material is a short passage from an illustrative library report, written for this course and attributed to no one; treat it as page 4 of the report. Here is the passage, one sentence per line:

1. "Libraries that stay open later in the evening draw more working adults, because many people with daytime jobs cannot visit before the doors close at five."
2. "When one branch added two late nights, its evening visits rose and its quiet study tables filled."
3. "Longer hours cost money, so the report recommends trying them at a single branch before changing the whole system."

Part A — audit a patch and write a real paraphrase. A classmate turned sentence 1 into this version and added the report's name after it:

"Libraries that remain open later in the night attract more working adults, because many people with daytime jobs cannot come before the doors shut at five."

The source sentence has 26 words, and the patched version keeps 21 of them in their original places; say how many single-word swaps the patch made and how you got that number. List each swap the patch made, word for word. Then explain in 2–3 sentences why adding the report's name does not fix the patch. Finally, run the cover-the-source test on sentence 1: cover it, write your own paraphrase from memory, and credit the report with a signal phrase. Say what you changed in the structure, not only the words.

Part B — integrate a quotation and summarize the source. An integrated quotation has 4 parts: signal phrase, exact fragment, page, and the writer's own analysis. A classmate's sentence supplies 1 of them, the fragment alone; say how many parts your revision must add. The classmate's sentence is: "'its evening visits rose.'" Rebuild it into one sentence that has all four parts. Choose a signal verb that matches what the report does, copy the fragment exactly, keep the page in parentheses right after it, and end with your own analysis of why the fragment matters to a reader deciding on library hours. Then write a one-sentence summary of the whole three-sentence passage, neutral and in your own words, with credit to the report. Keep your own opinion of the report out of the summary.

Explain it to a non-expert

A coworker putting together your team's newsletter copied two sentences from an industry report, changed a few words, and added the report's name at the end. They ask you why that is a problem when they gave credit. Write a 3–5 sentence message that explains, in everyday words, why credit does not fix borrowed sentences and what to do instead. Use your Part A audit as your example. Name one honest limit — for example, that sharing a few ordinary words, like "library" or "adults", does not by itself make a paraphrase a patch. Explain any term your coworker might not know.

For a different, ungraded example, imagine a neighbor making a flyer for a community garden who copied a seed packet's planting directions word for word and wants to know if that is all right. Model answer: "If you want the packet's exact words, put them in quotation marks and say they come from the packet. If you only need the idea, close the packet and write the directions the way you would explain them to a friend, then check that your sentences do not line up with the packet's. Either way, say where the advice came from. Common words like 'seeds' and 'soil' are fine to share; it is the packet's sentence shape you should not borrow."

Use that pattern for your coworker, with your own explanation of your audit.

Reflect on your revision

Before you submit, audit your first draft: cover the source and compare your paraphrase's skeleton with sentence 1, underline any run of three or more words you kept, label the four parts of your integrated quotation, check that your summary covers all three sentences without an opinion, and revise. Then answer one of these two options in 2–4 sentences; they carry the same weight:

• (a) Which change turned your first paraphrase into one that passed the cover-the-source test, and what in the skeleton showed you it was needed?
• (b) Which part of your integrated quotation changed most after your audit, and what does it now tell a reader that it did not before?

Deliverables

Submit in the assignment entry: the Part A swap count and how you got it, your swap list, your explanation, and your paraphrase; the Part B parts count and how you got it, your integrated quotation, and your summary; your message to your coworker; and your reflection. Each part may be written, or recorded as audio or video with a transcript; every form is graded by the same scoring criteria.

Submit in any accessible file type or as a link; a recorded response may be submitted as audio or video with a transcript, or as text.

How you'll be graded

The full analytic rubric is attached to this assignment in Canvas.

Academic integrity and AI use

The swap list, the paraphrase, the integrated quotation, the summary, the message, and the reflection must be your own words. This version of the assignment asks for no chatbot at any step. Quote only words you can find in the passage above, copied exactly, and never from memory.

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