Rebecca Howard lists activities usually defined as plagiarism, but they are different types of "crimes."
How often does each type of plagiarism happen?
The majority of plagiarism cases are done accidently.
Howard wrote that:
"Patchwriting is a form of imitation, of mimesis. It is a process of evaluating a source text, selecting passages pertinent to the patchwriter's purposes, and transporting those passages to the patchwriter'ss new context. It is a form of pentimento, in which one writer reshapes the work of another while leaving traces of the earlier writer's thought and intentions. It is something that all academic writers do."
She uses the "Greek mimesis and its Latin counterpart, imitation" to remind us of "the long, honorable history that mixing one's language with that of a source text has had" (p. 139), that "writer-text cllaboration bears some relation to an already-sanctioned textual practice, collaborative writing (p. 140), and that "patchwriting is a means of learning the language and ideas of the source" (p. 110), and in this way it is similar to the "visible trace of earlier painting beneath a layer or layers of paint on a canvas" (Oxford Dictionaries at http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/pentimento).
This guide was originally created by Ludy Goodson and Shannon Johnson for a presentation given at the Georgia International Information Literacy Conference. It was heavily revised in 2019 by Kris Frye, Shannon Johnson, and Debrah Huffman.