Rebecca Moore Howard

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.