Afterword: Researching source-based writing: where are we now, and where are we going?

Most university assessment genres involve a high degree of intertextuality, and inevitably so. The central purpose of all academic activity is to advance human understanding. Accounting for those advances almost always involves reference to earlier work which defines the current state of knowledge on the question at hand. A deficit model has been replaced by a developmental one, and to understand where writers are in their developmental trajectories, it is necessary to observe their accomplishments as well as the domains in which they can still progress. If the pathways to learning source-based writing are complex, it is because the process is itself complex. It is noteworthy that much of the early research on writing with sources came from a second-language writing perspective, and in retrospect it seems likely that this may relate to the degree of attention on language use which many L2 environments afford.