No time
You may feel you have no time to give thought or composition time to the assignment.

You should perhaps talk this over with your tutor. You may do too much reading and leave too little time to write. This is not a 2nd-language problem: 1st-language students also run out of time for the writing part of their assignments.

Inadequate English
You feel that you cannot express your ideas clearly, and will be marked down for using your own words.

Again, discuss this with your teacher/tutor. You may be surprised to hear that your own words, however expressed, will have a higher value to your teacher than those 'expertly expressed' published words from the textbooks.

Fear of acknowledging dependency
Do you fear that you will be penalised for revealing, in citing your sources, how many of your ideas are other people's?

This is actually unlikely. If you rely too much on the words of others, your teacher is likely to ask 'But what do you think?', and suggest you use your own words more in your next assignment.

Rebecca Howard describes a process among her students that she calls 'patch-writing'. This consists of 
"copying from a source text, and then deleting some words, altering grammatical structures, or (replacing single words)".
Ultimately, however, her aim was for her students to become:
"members of a community who meet, challenge, modify and perhaps even replace its (ideas)". (1992: 243).

Last updated 03 March 2003