Week 10 Discussion — Where Does Borrowing End? — Traditional alternative (no AI)

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

Hook

Every writer who uses sources draws a line somewhere between what they borrowed and what they made. This week you learned the three honest moves — quotation, paraphrase, and summary — the signal phrase, credit for ideas as well as words, and the trap of patchwriting, all on Strunk's Rule 13 passage from The Elements of Style (1918) and the running draft's quotation from Beland and Murphy.

Your discussion question — choose Option A or Option B; they carry the same weight and the same rubric, and you say which you picked.

Option A: How much of a source's sentence can a writer keep before a paraphrase stops being theirs? Use this week's Rule 13 passage and its patched version, or a paraphrase you wrote yourself for another class, and argue where the line falls. Use the cover-the-source test, and say what a citation does and does not fix.

Option B: When does a fact become common knowledge? Pick a fact from your major, your job, or a community you belong to that one audience would call common knowledge and another would not, and argue whether a writer should cite it in a paper for this course. Say who the reader is and what that reader would need.

There is no single right answer. Careful writers disagree about how many shared words a paraphrase can keep, and the same fact can be common knowledge in a nursing unit and news in a history class. Argue the case you can actually support with a specific example.

Expectations

Activity format: one initial post followed by two substantive peer replies. Plan on about 45 minutes across the two deadlines; your instructor sets both due dates in Canvas.

Your initial post — by the first due date (early in the module week):

• Say which option you chose.
• Name the sentence or the fact you are working with, so a reader knows what you are looking at. Quote a source only in words you have found in the real text.
• Use at least two of this week's terms (quotation, paraphrase, summary, signal phrase, attribution, common knowledge, patchwriting, cover-the-source test) correctly.
• Take a position on where the line falls and support it with a reason or an example, naming the reader your judgment depends on.
• Length: roughly 150–250 words if written. You may instead record your post as audio or video (about two minutes) and attach a transcript; both forms are scored by the same rubric.

Your replies — by the second due date (the end of the module week):

• Reply substantively to at least two classmates.
• A substantive reply does more than agree: run the cover-the-source test on a classmate's example, name a reader for whom their fact would not be common knowledge, or ask what their citation does and does not fix. "Nice point!" on its own does not count.

What a strong post looks like (illustrative, written for this course):

I chose Option A. I think the line falls at the skeleton, not the word count. The patched Rule 13 changes eight words, but it keeps Strunk's two sentences, his order, and his comparison, so when I cover the source it still lines up slot by slot. The paraphrase that compares "a padded sentence to a drawing with stray lines" shares the words "drawing" and "machine", but its shape is new. Someone could argue that a citation is enough, since Strunk gets credit either way. I would answer that the citation credits his idea, while the patch borrows his sentence too.

Notice how it states a position, points to specific wording, names a fair counterpoint, and answers it. That is the bar.

Participation rubric

This discussion is worth 10 points. The three criteria below look at your initial post and your peer replies.

Post early if you can — the best threads happen when people have time to reply before the second due date.

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