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English Composition · Chapter 10

The Repair Shop: Four Switches, One Sentence

One source sentence, four switches, eighteen possible drafts — and only four of them are ones a reader would accept. Change the wording, the quotation marks, the citation and the locator, and watch the verdict move. The point to hunt for: a citation alone never fixes borrowed language, and synonyms never fix borrowed structure.
The source you are working from
Okonkwo (2021), page 44
“Nurses on rotating schedules reported more medication errors than nurses on fixed schedules, but the difference narrowed sharply on units that guaranteed two consecutive days off after a night block.”
Switch 1 · How did you write it?
Switches 2–4 · What did you attach?
Read the two meters together. A text-matching service can only see the first one. Your instructor, who has read the source, sees the second. That gap is the entire reason patchwriting gets caught in office hours rather than by software.
Legitimate combinations found 0 of 4
Your sentence as it would appear in the paper
Shaded spans are runs of four or more words that appear verbatim in the source.
Verbatim word overlap 0%
Structural alignment with the source 0%
Clause map · source on the left, your clause on the right